


A Brief Specific History of One to Another

by blythechild



Category: Criminal Minds
Genre: Aliens, Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Angst, Bigotry & Prejudice, Break Up, Children, Divorce, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, Fake Character Death, Falling In Love, Friends to Lovers, Friendship is Magic, Friendship/Love, Grief/Mourning, Historical References, Homosexuality, Immortals in Space, Memoirs, Memories, Mistakes, Multi, Near Future, Polyamory, Protectiveness, Regret, Romantic Friendship, Secret Identity, Self-Discovery, Separations, Suicide, Terrorism, Time Travel, Tragedy, Undercover Missions, War
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-07-22
Updated: 2017-07-22
Packaged: 2018-12-05 12:06:40
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 13
Words: 38,804
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11577756
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/blythechild/pseuds/blythechild
Summary: In 1959 a naked man suddenly appears in the New Mexico desert. He has no idea what kind of adventure he’s about to embark upon. Thankfully, he’s a scientist and believes in documenting everything, otherwise the one he loves the most wouldn’t believe any of it ever happened.This is a work of fanfiction and as such I do not claim ownership over the characters herein. It was created as a personal amusement. This story contains depictions of violence and sexuality, and should not be read by those under the age of 18.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> A few things:  
> 1\. This is an AU. Although I have borrowed characters and events from canon, I have altered them to fit my narrative. Nothing in this is canon-compliant.
> 
> 2\. There are multiple pairings in this story and they are all important. If you do not enjoy fics that feature a character in more than one relationship, this story is not for you. Consider yourself warned - no ‘ship snippiness, please.
> 
> 3\. There is reference to suicide in this story.
> 
> 4\. There is a description of the events of September 11th 2001 in this. I understand that this is a sensitive subject for some, and while the description isn’t very detailed, I feel compelled to issue a heads-up about it just in case.

I am writing this from beginning to end in the hopes that it will make the most sense to you, but that is not how I experienced it. I’ve struggled with time since the day I arrived here; I’ve never seen it the same way as everyone else, but time is one of the few measures with which to understand this tale, so I’ll do my best. Please forgive any grammatical tense slippage or other momentary confusion. I am told that I am confusing in general, so perhaps this will unconsciously give you more insight into me. Wouldn’t that be a happy accident?

I won’t start with a dissertation on the universal mechanics of time because, irony of ironies, I do not _have_ the time for that. But you should understand that for me time is fluid and elastic. It is more like the breathing soup in which the universe marinates, and it is also almost infinitely changeable. Humans see time as linear, rigid, and flowing in a single direction without compromise or variation. None of these things are true. Unfortunately, these are not beliefs for humanity, but rather ‘truths’ that form the rules for existence. Every person on Earth is born into a knowledge system that espouses and re-informs these errors: in essence, they are the world around them. And short of giving a mandatory, global class on quantum reality with a lot of higher order mathematics in the mix, these ‘truths’ will persist. I know that they are wrong just as you know that they are right - we were both born to these perspectives - but it is not my place or the purpose of this document to align these views into harmony. I’ve already spent too much ink and paper on them. Just please be aware that even seemingly-inalterable truths may be wrong while still functioning admirably - in this case, allowing your life and the life of everyone like you to exist. Such contradictory juxtapositions are proof, to me at least, that the universe has a dry sense of humor.

It is August 1959 when I arrive just outside Roswell, New Mexico ready to begin my work. Though I have researched exhaustively in preparation for my trip, a few details have slipped my mind like clothes and identification. Let me tell you that being naked and foreign in the middle of an abandoned highway in the desert just two miles from a secret U.S. military base isn’t the best way to make a first impression on anyone. I am picked up and detained by the military police from the base and then thoroughly interrogated by a long line of officers of escalating importance. My answers to their questions are unflinchingly honest, with a few notable exceptions, but they ultimately fail to clarify the situation. This gives birth to a typically human dilemma: what to do with someone who does not make sense? My dear, you will find that this dilemma happens often. Things that do not make sense, no matter how benign in appearance or intent, seem threatening to a vast majority of people. Self-protection is a primary survival function, so it is not all that unexpected as a reaction. But it does get people into a whole lot of trouble more often than not.

They ask my name so I make one up on the spot. I will keep it for the rest of my life. I am fond of it and it is how you know me, but it was a random choice. I wish that part of the story were more profound. They ask where I came from, and for that I do not have an obvious or plausible answer. I don’t even have a decent lie prepared, which was poor planning on my part because even if I didn’t understand the necessity for clothes, I _did_ understand the necessity for disguising my origin. Several rounds of interrogation with different men happen before I choose the lie that will define me. Well, one of them anyway. 

A colonel enters the room and asks me the same dozen questions I’ve been asked before. I tell him that I’m on vacation with friends from college and drank too much, thus explaining my mysterious lack of clothes and recent memory. My friends are practical jokers and probably thought dumping me in the desert without my wallet would be hilarious. It’s a thin lie and yet they seem almost relieved to accept it. But the real revelation happens when they move me from the interrogation suite that has been my only view of this place aside from the dusty backtop where I arrived, to the colonel’s barracks where they assume I can be safely kept until they decide what to do with me. As we walk through the facility we pass a room where men in lab coats are puzzling out a dizzying array of calculations on a grubby chalkboard. I recognize both its purpose as well as their mistake instantly. I call out that they have made an error in their flow rate calculation at absolute zero and as a result their fuel injection ratio is dangerously inaccurate. Whatever they are planning to power will go extremely fast for approximately seven seconds before impressively exploding. 

And everything around me just _stops._

Almost everyone’s gaze goes to the chalkboard, but one man steps forward and introduces himself. He is Martin Polonovski. I only meet him on this day and then never again, but I remember him because he was the first person to offer me his name. He smiles as he holds out his hand to me - he has no fear of my strangeness or that I’m only dressed in a towel and surrounded by MPs with guns. His grip is warm and solid, skin rough from overwashing and the talc from rubber gloves. In that moment I understand that people are as different and varied as bacteria or space dust - no particle is entirely identical. This man speaks my language - the first one I ever learned: math, and that is all he needs to know about me in order to form a bond. Unlike the men with guns at my back, his trust is easily attained and suspicion is not his primary impulse. At the time, I wonder if he is an outlier in the human experience but as I move through this story I find many others who possess aspects of Martin Polonovski, and that has always given me hope, even in my darkest moments.

I am asked how I know the things I know and I make up the second lie that will come to define me: I am a child prodigy who graduated college at seventeen. I have a dizzying array of accreditations. I am a chess master. It is well before Google and the world wide web - these things are hard to confirm and then easily rectified if found wanting. The lie is necessary because in another spectacular miscalculation I have chosen an appearance that is too young for my perceived knowledge. Men who know what I know are old, grey-haired, lined with study and concentration. I am barely twenty-five.

At this point, I have to make a non-sequiter to explain another basic truth about me. In the same way that time occurs differently for me, it also affects my form (or doesn’t affect it) differently. I do not age. I appear twenty-five when I arrive and I appear the same way when I depart. Of course, this is just an illusion because I am a mortal creature. I am subject to entropy and decay like all complex structures in the universe. One day I will die, my dear, just like you. It is not to be feared; it just _is._ But the appearance I chose when I came here is not… well, _me._ It is more like an outfit I put on. In fact, it is my favorite outfit, which is why I’ve never altered it even when it fell out of fashion. But the outfit never changes, it never ages, and as you can imagine, over time that becomes a problem. 

I look twenty-five but I am far older. My actual age, in a linear-based construct of time, wouldn’t make any sense to you and I fear that it may distance you from me in this narrative so I’m going to be bashful and keep it to myself. I will tell you one thing though: the human adage _“you’re only as old as you feel”_ is completely accurate. At many points in this journey I have felt embarrassingly awkward and painfully young in spite of all my experiences. I don’t think you ever lose that sense of uncertainty and that’s probably a good thing. It keeps you curious, or afraid, and neither one of those is negative so long as it propels you forward. If you take only one thing away with you from this story, my love, please take that. Always remain curious. Always move forward.

So, my second lie and my obvious knowledge not only allow me to avoid a stay in federal prison, but also garner me a job. The credentials that I made up suddenly become a reality, and my identity becomes codified and documented as I rapidly cease being a naked stranger on a highway and transition into a respected aerospace engineer working on classified government test projects with an extreme security clearance. I’d like to say that this was always my plan, but that would be another lie. I know a lot of things, and I had some understanding of what would happen to me when I came here, but time shifts with each choice we make, closing off some potentialities while simultaneously creating a burst of new ones. And the choices and possibilities are almost endless, constantly adjusting, so that even someone with a broader view like me finds it dizzying and impossible to predict any outcome. But more on this later. 

My adventure begins in 1959. I arrive, I attain a job, I observe, and I am content. My investigation begins.


	2. Chapter 2

The mechanics of life here are easily learned. The basics: respiration, a functioning cardiovascular system, sleep, energy intake, extraction of essential elements processed from that intake, and then excretion of waste. The more advanced: knowledge accumulation, conversion of short-term to long-term memory, information retrieval, the negotiation between left and right hemispheres for task completion, the elasticity of storage and recall, autonomic vs. conscious management, and the navigation of self-awareness. I’m not saying that I have mastered these (well, maybe the basics - they sorta came with the outfit), but I am familiar enough with them that they don’t stand in my way. But there is one element that I’ve always struggled with: interpersonal connection. The problem is that people are opaque. They rely on language and an almost intuitive understanding of body signifiers in order to communicate. Well, I learn language (all of them) because that’s what people do, but the body intuition eludes me (for obvious reasons). I have trouble relating to a great many people that I meet. This does not bother me but it does impact my investigation. I devote some thought to how I might reduce this unexpected deviation from the success of my project.

It is October 1962 and Earth’s ‘superpowers’ appear to be on the brink of mutually assured destruction with the Cuban Missile Crisis. It is all anyone can talk about, whether it be my colleagues at White Sands or the locals at the Martian Diner down the road where I go for pie and coffee. I love pie and coffee. Newspapers and TV feed into the hysteria until there is as much untruth floating around as truth, and fear overtakes rationality. I watch it unfold with interest, but no sense of urgency or impending doom; the reality is that a nuclear holocaust might wipe out enough of humanity to push the species to extinction - it might lead to the extinction of hundreds of species - but extinction is inevitable for _everything._ I fail to see what all of the fuss is about. While the knowledge that this extinction is self-manufactured is indeed an unnecessary tragedy, humans are mistaken that it is ‘the end of the world’. Earth will not end because of it; Earth has withstood five previous extinction-level events in its brief life. Life will reassert itself on this planet after humans are gone and the cycle will begin again. Perhaps the dominant life form this time around will be water-born or develop telepathy as their primary method of communication. Maybe it will take the form of a virus and colonize through cellular assimilation and mutation. The possibilities are fascinating to contemplate.

But as I look around at the faces of my fellow diners, I realize that I have failed to appreciate the appropriate level of mortal fear that they feel. This is because no matter what America or the U.S.S.R. decides to do in any possible reality, I will not die here. This flaw in my investigation depresses me and I am unsure of how to address it.

“It’s enough to make you give up hope, isn’t it?” she says as she refills my coffee cup. I come here often enough that I recognize her but I don’t know her name. The stitching on her uniform above her apron says ‘Blanche’. I blink and then nod because I don’t know how else to respond. She smiles at me in a tired way that belies her youth and then she leans on the countertop and looks over the faces I’ve just dispassionately observed, like we’re sharing insights or something. “We could all die at any moment, thanks to the Ruskies.”

“Death is an ever-present threat. This situation has just heightened our awareness of it, that’s all. Prior to this you were simply inured towards your mortality.”

I don’t know what possess me to say it, but I do. She looks at me for a moment and then utterly surprises me when she laughs. Her fingers brush mine on the countertop. Her nails are short but painted with a pink lacquer that matches the shade of her lips. She is pretty in a way that humans universally agree upon: optimal body weight for her height, symmetrical features, obvious care given to her attributes that signify her as female. I am further flummoxed and I don’t know why. She doesn’t seem to notice.

“You’re from White Sands, aren’t you?”

“Is it so apparent?”

“Most of my regulars are from Roswell or the military base. I live in Roswell and I’ve never seen you there. Plus, you’re more of a Poindexter than most of the local guys, and all of those types hang out at the base. Not many show their faces around here.”

I am still stuck on what ‘Poindexter’ means. Then she leans in a little closer. Her irises are light brown with flecks of green at the perimeter.

“But you’re kinda young to work there. And maybe a little too cute to be a nerd.”

I am completely unprepared to negotiate this signaling of physical attraction. For some reason, I always thought the process would be more obvious and that my role, if I chose to engage with it, would follow a logical progression. But it doesn’t - not with Blanche in 1962 and not at any point afterwards. Even now, I feel this is an important truth to understand: it doesn’t _make sense_ , my dear, so try not to worry about it. It’s probably the most confusing thing I’ve experienced here, and none of you seem to manage it any better. 

With great relief I discover that Blanche is a woman ahead of her time: she negotiates this labyrinth for both of us. It is six years before the birth of the ‘Sexual Revolution’ but a waitress in the New Mexico desert knew what she wanted and how to get it without waiting on socially-approved instruction or permission. 

The process is fascinating. She shows me what I need to know without judgment or condemnation at my lack of experience. I have my first understanding of the physical manifestations of pleasure - I feel the increased heart rate, capillary dilation, elevated body temperature, sensate hyperawareness, arousal, plateau, release, and the onslaught of dopamine and serotonin in the aftermath as I experience the powerful, addictive response that is the key to humanity’s continued survival. I am grateful to her for giving me this opportunity, for teaching me this. It is invaluable data.

But as we lie together on her cramped bed in her Airstream trailer trying to catch our breath, she offers me another breakthrough that I didn’t know to ask for. She tells me that she’s not really afraid of dying (she thinks that radiation poisoning is quick and painless, and I decide that now is not the moment to correct her on this point). She says what she’s really afraid of is dying while never having done more with her life than being a waitress in the middle of nowhere. She tells me where she comes from - another patch of nowhere - and how she adores her parents, how her father always tells her she is pretty enough to be in the movies. Then she tells me of his death, and how she leaves her home and her mother behind when she remarries a cruel man. She is seventeen when she leaves home with thirty-one dollars in her pocket and a bag of clothes heading west to California. She is twenty-three now as she lies with me in a beat-up trailer waiting for two men to sort out whether they are going to end her life or not.

For an instant when she tells me her story, I feel this alien burst at the center of me between my ribs. I wrap my arms around her as the feeling sinks down into my gastrointestinal tract and twists. I know that these are _not_ physical feelings, but emotional ones manifesting physically through a bizarre synaptic translation that is supposed to be ‘normal’. It is both frightening and spectacular, and then, a moment later, the sensations subside. But in that moment, my love, I have achieved my first real connection to another person and it is heady. I want to duplicate it. I want to understand it. But, as with most worthwhile investigations, this will take time and I will make errors in my calculations. Nevertheless, I have my first glimpse at interpersonal symbiosis and empathy; I understand Blanche’s mortal fear, if only temporarily, rather than just recognizing it with detachment. This fills me with joy though I have never told anyone that until now.

Despite this breakthrough, I never see Blanche in this way again. I continue going to the diner for coffee and pie, and when I do I always smile at her and spare a few moments for idle conversation. But we never sleep together again. I do not feel disappointed by this, nor do I feel that Blanche ever expects me to solicit her attention once more. October passes and the mortal trepidation that brought the world to a standstill cannot be sustained. The crisis is over and everyone moves on. One day early in 1963 I go to the diner and Blanche is gone. Her replacement - a woman with horn-rimmed glasses, a world-weary expression and a penchant for calling everyone ‘Honey’ - tells me that she quit without notice. She doesn’t even return her uniform. I wonder where she has gone but otherwise feel nothing. I have a momentary thought that I should drive into Roswell to see if her trailer is still there, but the feeling passes. I don’t think of her again after that until I write her story down here. Despite her clear importance, my connection to her was exceptionally transient. Now, as I write these words so far away from that moment in time, I wonder if it would bring her any happiness to know how she helped me; she was the beginning of the mysterious unraveling that now means everything to me. I hope she achieved whatever she wanted for herself, but regardless, I will never forget her.


	3. Chapter 3

We skip ahead now to 1971. America is birthing a terrible social eruption that is as disturbing to the national psyche as the prospect of nuclear war is. It is as pernicious and hysterical as the Cold War - filled with mendacious propaganda by those in power, and executed with brutal clumsiness by those without. But it is absolutely necessary for human evolution. The Civil Rights movement, Women’s Liberation, the Sexual Revolution, the rise of the psychedelic drug culture, artistic and musical experimentation, pacifism and the swell of conscious objectors to violence, the ongoing advancement of scientific exploration, the birth of the supercomputer… it is the simultaneous culmination of so many disparate elements as to be unique in all of human history. Any number of outcomes could emerge from such a volatile mixture. From an investigational standpoint, it is pure gold. 

Sadly, I can only experience it distantly. I am in Vietnam, having been drafted in spite of my security clearance. I do not fight the order, though I’m certain that I could have been successful if I had. My perpetual youth has become more than just a casual comment amongst the staff at White Sands. My colleagues have changed - some have retired, some have died, and some have moved on - but enough faces remain to pose a threat to me with their speculation. The war is going badly, and those who get drafted now are usually looked upon with a knowing sadness. Most won’t return, and if they do, they are so changed by the experience that the prevailing opinion is that they’d be better off if they didn’t. 

My colleagues throw me a party before I leave for basic training but it’s more like a wake. I know that no matter what happens to me, I’ll never see these people again. I say goodbye and hug them and leave on a bus for the coast the next day. I’ve worked side by side with them for a decade but I leave without looking back, and I am not sad at all. 

A research fellow writes me letters all the way through training until I receive my posting overseas. Her letters are filled with professional anecdotes and personal insights. I look forward to reading and responding in kind. We were intimate over the years but I don’t think anything of it when we correspond - it’s just nice to have something to stimulate my intellect during the monotony of army life. When I land in Saigon I receive a few more letters. She is persistent. But when I move further in-country to join my unit, mail delivery becomes a thing of the past. I understand now that she probably did this because she was in love with me - her letters were filled with concern for my safety - but at the time I didn’t understand that. Like Blanche, I don’t know what happened to her, but unlike Blanche, I never bothered to wonder. This has taught me another valuable lesson: that some individuals are more important than others. I do feel shame about this - which I understand is _very_ human - but I will not let that diminish the truth of this realization. This is another reality that will eventually apply to you, my love. 

Because of my chemistry background and (invented) PhDs, I am assigned to the army medical core. I protest - I am not a medical doctor even though I understand as much about human anatomy as any surgeon there. But it is determined that given the widespread use of chemical agents in the conflict, my talents will be best suited to tending to the victims of such attacks. This means that I will never see the front lines, which is probably for the best as my frame is slight and prone to clumsiness. But I do not escape the horrors of this war. They pass over my table in a seemingly unending procession of human carnage. Men brought to me without limbs, men holding their internal organs in their hands, men made sightless by catastrophe despite being physically unharmed, men burned by chemicals mixed in order to produce maximum pain before death, men bleeding out over my shoes, men screaming for their mothers, men begging God for understanding, for a single moment of meaningful revelation before they end…

I am sickened. For eight hundred and twenty-six days I fight the urge to throw up until I pass out. It is a constant state of being while I am conscious, and there are moments when I wonder why I am still here. Just a month spent here is enough to learn all that is required about human misery. Empirically, there is nothing to be gained by collecting more data at the cost of my fledgling sensitivity. I come very close to leaving forever, little one. It would be the effort of a moment to make it happen, and then I could move on putting all of this _inhumanity_ behind me, for lack of a more accurate term. But I stay for you. You are too important. I am unsure, in these moments in Vietnam, about the why, the how, the when of you, but I am certain _of you_ , and so, I remain.

It is at this point in the story that I meet Samuel. He limps into my triage tent one swampy afternoon and presents me with an almost prosaic case of trench foot. Nothing else. I don’t know if we would’ve made an impression on each other if I hadn’t laughed out loud at that. 

“What’s so fucking funny, Doc?” His eyes are dark, but not menacing. There are lines around them from squinting into the sun, and they probably also come from laughing. I don’t know this yet, but Sam laughs a lot. His feet are a mess and he’s doubtlessly in a certain amount of pain, but more than anything he seems pissed off at me.

“You are,” I say without thinking that I’m insulting him, which I am. “Hundreds of guys come in here every day dying a thousand different, agonizing deaths, and then you show up because you can’t manage to keep your socks dry. How long have you been in-country?”

“Four months.” He groans as I move his feet up onto the table where there are marginally less germs that will infect and kill him. I shake my head and laugh again.

“How can you be this dumb and still be alive here?”

I don’t really expect an answer - in truth, I care nothing about his survival or intelligence at all. Whatever humanity I gained is being leeched away by this place. But Sam isn’t the sort to leave a challenge unmet.

“Doc, do you really believe that brains have anything to do with this goddamned war?”

I look up at him then. His hair is as dark as his eyes, and just a bit too long in the front to meet army regulations. It falls into his gaze every few minutes and he spends a lot of time and energy shaking it from his view. For the first time I see the hardness to his features, the muscle flexing along his jaw line. He is not as young as he seems. He is tanned to a dark brown, proof that he’s been on active duty for a while. His body is strong, broad, and lean - muscles developed from necessity and from toting a twenty-pound pack wherever he goes. This cursory evidence suggests that Samuel is capable in this environment, despite his infected feet. He’s certainly more outwardly suited to it than I am.

“I’m just trying to survive this, just like every other unlucky shit here. Just like you, Doc. Nothing dumb about that.”

“No, you’re right,” I tell him. “There’s nothing dumb about wanting to get out of here.”

In that moment, I want to leave so badly it feels like something I can reach out and grasp. But instead I am holding Samuel’s feet. I have a job to do. I work in silence for a long time before Sam speaks again.

“Hey Doc,” he says gently. “Why are _you_ here?”

“I don’t know,” I answer truthfully before following it with, “I was drafted. Like you.”

“Yeah, but you’re an educated man. I can see that much. It should be a better war than this one to claim a man like you, shouldn’t it?”

“A ‘better war’?” I am completely confused. Sam smiles back. It is the first time I’ve seen him do it. It changes the entire architecture of his face and I understand that he is attractive as instantly as a light being switched on.

“Yeah, Doc, a _better_ war. Not this one. Not this low class war fought for no particular reason by people who no one thinks much of losing in the first place. Just blacks and Mexicans and retards and guys who didn’t want to go to prison and a whole bunch of kids who’d never make it to college. We’re fightin’ an enemy we don’t understand in an old fashioned way for objectives that make no sense. This is class warfare to cover up the fact that we came in here and imposed our shit on folks who didn’t want it, and if we back out now we lose face in front of the entire world. We’re fighting the Viet Cong for America’s ego and we’re sacrificin’ an whole generation of kids too stupid to realize it or hop on a bus to Canada.”

I stare at Sam and realize that we’ve been having the sanest, most truthful conversation since I arrived at my posting. I’ve made no connections here - I assume that’s because I’m busy from the moment I wake until the moment I pass out. But here I am, talking with a stranger who has the clearest, unfettered view of this war as anyone I’ve met and I understand that I _like him._ It is stupid because everything in this place is temporary and once I fix his feet he’ll push on to catch up with his unit again, but I want to befriend him. It swells inside me almost like the feeling I experienced with Blanche. But different.

I smile back at him and it feels more like instinct than a choice. I am momentarily amazed that I might be developing instincts. “Well, if you’re here and I’m here, I guess neither of us is too smart.”

“Speak for yerself, Doc,” Sam grins. It is blinding. “I was _this close_ to makin’ it to Canada.”

We both laugh. It is easy, like breathing. I take my time tending to his feet, drawing it out against the backdrop of the moans and screams of men just like Samuel dying around us. For this brief interlude, it falls away from my awareness as Sam tells me about his home (Dallas), his family (three sisters - Jenny, Rona, and Susie), and his friend who writes to him as he waits for him in Toronto where he is safe (Jeffrey). Sam’s parents didn’t have money for college but Sam is an avid reader, his intelligence is earned through genuine effort. The more he talks, the more I like him, but he doesn’t ask anything about me. As I wrap his feet and explain how he should take his medication, the triage reality reasserts itself and I am filled with dread at being alone in it once more. The feeling in me swells again in panic as he hobbles to his feet.

“Don’t die,” I say and am afraid that I have done so. Sam looks at me curiously before shrugging it away and smirking. “It would be a waste of topical foot cream,” I add, and then I tell him to wait as I rummage around in the tent’s pathetic supply closet. I return with a new pair of regulation-green socks and hand them to him. “Do your best to keep them dry.”

His fingers land on mine as I pass the socks and they linger before pulling away. I don’t know what it means, if anything. Sam winks and walks out of the tent into rain as I wince at the dim prognosis for his infection in such weather. There is no reason to expect that we’ll ever meet again.

But we do, six weeks later. He comes strolling back into the triage tent with his gun hanging from his shoulder and even more tanned. When he smiles, his teeth look like searchlights in the olive-drab shadows. We are in between bouts of wounded and I am cleaning my table with diluted rubbing alcohol and a grubby rag. My scrubs and uniform beneath it are soaked with blood from various men - it is pointless to change too often. I’m not sure but I think there is blood splatter on my face from the corporal with the nicked femoral artery who bled out in my hands just twenty minutes before. If Sam notices, he acts like it’s nothing. I smile when I see him and it probably looks horrific through the veneer of blood and gore all over me.

“How are the feet?” I ask, although he’s striding like he’s never known weakness a day in his life.

“Perfect. How’s the professional pessimism?”

I don’t really think his assessment is accurate, but I remember that he has a clearer view than most. And the scientist in me recognizes that I may be biased in this area. “The same, I guess. It’s not easily quantifiable.”

Sam slaps his thigh and laughs like he’s just discovered how. He comes closer and knocks me in the shoulder with his fist. I am confused because the act is aggressive but his presence is nothing but friendly. I clearly have a lot to learn about ‘being friends’.

“I love it, Doc. Yer a nut.” He wipes his hand on his fatigues - I guess there was blood on my shoulder. “Listen, I want ta thank you for the socks. Me and the boys liberated some beer from the requisitions officer, an’ we’ve got four days ta kill before we head back out on patrols.”

I’m unsure what he’s asking but I politely refuse, especially if it involves dealing with a bunch of drunken grunts. Sam is one thing - he’s easy to get along with - but soldiers in general don’t like me and what they call my ‘professor patter’. Sam’s smile falters for a moment but he insists. He doesn’t really have to try too hard - I am that pleased to see him again. We agree to meet after the evening meal and the gathering is basically a group of privates standing around a fire in a ten gallon barrel telling off-color jokes to one another while hiding their stubbies when the MPs drive by. I am quiet and out of sorts with them, as well as being unfamiliar with the amount of drinking that is expected of me. But every time I look at Sam he smiles and clinks the neck of his bottle against mine.

In time, it gets hard to retain my balance and the other grunts start to get some bad ideas about what to do next for entertainment. I’m about to stumble back to my tent when a hand wraps around my bicep. Sam is still smiling when I turn to him. He doesn’t even seem drunk.

“Let’s get outta here before we get collared fer what they’re gonna do.”

I agree and lead him back to my tent without thinking about it. The implications of such scenarios won’t occur to me for many more years. It is knowledge that can only be taught through experience, and my experience at this point is in its infancy. The staff tents are dual occupancy but I lost my roommate two months earlier when he is promoted to a field hospital and never comes back. Sam couldn’t have known this in advance, but when we trip into the tent and he sees the empty cot across from mine, it’s like he’s been given a present. 

I turn around to say something and he kisses me. It is not an accident or drunken clumsiness. My confusion expands when the joy I felt upon seeing him again comes back, but ten times stronger, and then transforms into the surprising sensations that I first felt with Blanche. I mimic the way he’s holding me and I use everything I know about kissing. It’s not insubstantial - I’ve been known to practice a lot. He makes a surprised, satisfied sound and moves closer to me. When he does, I understand why everything with him comes so easily: this is attraction, but a form that I haven’t tested.

Here again, I must segue, and it will be hard for you to understand, my love, but bear with me. Humans are binary - two distinct genders with an array of individual sexual and emotional preferences resulting from that. I am not. My kind are genderless, each individual carrying all of the genetic requirements to reproduce without additional support. Reproduction is a biological imperative, as it is with all life forms, but it is devoid of the pleasure component that exists in humans. We find pleasure, as you would understand it, in other ways. At this point in my tale, I have been human for fourteen years and I have experimented with pleasure whenever it struck me. But never once has it been for the purpose of reproduction. Initially I was very confused that two seemingly disparate functions resulted from the same act - I wondered how humans weren’t constantly questioning the purpose of coupling each time they did it. But then I looked closer at the care that’s required for human offspring and realized that the pleasure function is a sneaky cognitive design to facilitate the increased odds of young maturing to adulthood. Two protectors are better than one, and two will remain connected if given adequate incentive to do so. But since reproduction was never my goal, I only ever approached sex from the pleasure aspect. And because my species is genderless, I have no perceived restrictions as to partners, or even any strong feelings about the gender I chose for myself when I arrived here.

So, kissing Sam in my tent is as naturally curious as being with Blanche in her trailer, or my colleague at White Sands, or any of the others that I have failed to mention here. None of it was something I understood before I tried it, and a good scientist tries not to form any conclusions before collecting data. Sam feels good and I like him and my body is attracted to his. It is as simple as that from my perspective. But from everyone else’s perspective we are two men in the U.S. Army in Vietnam in 1972 and we are fornicating. For him to even reveal himself to me is a terrible risk. At other times in human existence, this behavior is viewed more kindly, but right now as Sam strips me out of my clothes, pushes me down onto my cot, and gives me an entirely new experience with his mouth and hands, I am overwhelmed by his trust in me. It makes this the strongest connection I have encountered with anyone up to this point. And I am addicted to it instantly. This addiction will plague me later - it might make you disappointed in me. But like all addictions, it isn’t a choice. And, perhaps more importantly, without it, we will never meet, which I find unacceptable.

Afterwards when Sam and I curl around each other under the mosquito netting praying that we avoid any malarial insects and hoping our sweat dries in the 70% humidity, he tells me about Jeffrey, and his motivations suddenly come into focus. Jeffrey is the love of Sam’s brief life. They grew up three doors down from each other in his hometown. They’ve known one another since they were toddlers. Jeffrey is an intellectual, making it to college on an academic scholarship that ensures he’ll eventually escape the nothingness that is bearing down on Sam. But Jeffrey never forgets about Sam. From afar he sends Sam books and lecture notes, he encourages him to self-educate because knowledge isn’t the right of the privileged few. When the war begins, Jeffrey accepts a job at a Canadian university and once settled, asks Sam to join him north of the border where the conflict can’t touch him. It isn’t certain to me whether Jeffrey and Sam have ever been lovers, but Sam is deeply in love regardless of that fact. And it is obvious that I am a surrogate for the man he adores and can’t be with.

For the first time, I feel disappointment. It is a valuable lesson to learn. Sam turns to me and asks if I am upset by this, but this is the time of social upheaval and redefining boundaries and of _‘love the one you’re with’_. I tell him I’m not and he believes me, and as we go along (because we continue together, perhaps both too lonely and frightened to face our possible ends in this hellish country singly) I come to believe it too. I enjoy Sam: I enjoy his body and his mind, and his smile makes me smile as well, even as I write this. We have to be so careful, and there are long periods where he disappears and I have no way of knowing his condition. We have to accept this because we have no other choice, but I am never comfortable with it. After a few months, I understand that I have taken another step in my emotional journey: I _care_ for him. I notice his absence without provocation. I plan for our future encounters. It feels… _warming_.

One day I receive a letter from him. It is the only one he ever sends me. I love letters, and because I am fond of him, I am doubly pleased. In it, he is vague - comments on the broiling heat, the towns he’s passed through, and oblique mentions of the things he’s done there. We both know that random mail checks are made - no one is permitted to discuss details of the conflict even to other active soldiers. To do so is a court marshal offence. But what stands out to me are his final lines:

_“Out here I have plenty of time to think, when I’m not fighting to stay alive, that is. I’ve made an important decision, Doc, and I want you to be the first one who knows about it. I don’t wanna write it down ‘cause it’s personal - I need to tell you face-to-face. I wanna see what you think & feel about it. Your opinion has always meant a lot. Will you meet me during my next leave? We’re due back on the 27th. Come to the firepit after dinner that evening, okay? Even if you get caught in surgery or something, come afterwards. I’ll wait for you._

_Yours,  
Sam”_

I don’t know what he’s alluding to but I am intrigued. Life here is so horrifically boring after all. On the 27th I go to the firepit. There are many men there, but not Sam. I wait. And I wait. And I wait some more. A slightly inebriated private offers me a beer and I take it. I do not talk to him; there is only one person I wish to talk to. 

I finish my beer. I wait even longer. 

The men disperse but I stay waiting until dawn creeps over the horizon again. I have a morning shift - it will begin at 05:00. Sam doesn’t come and I shuffle away from the firepit feeling disappointed for the second time. I try not to speculate what the conversation might have been about. That would be pointless. I also try not to be upset with Sam. He’s never been cruel to me; if he couldn’t come, he surely has a reason for it.

The day progresses, and then stretches into two. Then a week. A new offensive is launched and it is disastrous - the casualties flood my hospital and I am so busy that I can barely remember to eat or sleep. The faces blur under my hands along with the blood and pointlessness. Finally, three weeks later a lull hits us and I get to indulge in the least taxing part of my duties: collating death notices for shipment to Saigon, and there onto the States and their unsuspecting recipients. This sounds cold, my love, but I look forward to this. They are just paperwork, and I would take that over a terrified boy shitting his pants in my arms while screaming for his mother any day. Please don’t judge that.

I am almost enjoying the monotony of the task, out of the sun, dust, and bugs, shuffling papers and sitting in front of a rotary fan. I can almost pretend that I’m back in my office at White Sands. Then a name catches my attention: Rona Sterling. I remember that Sam told me one of his sisters got married while he was here. He sent her a gift from Saigon. On the craft paper he scrawled _Mr. & Mrs. J. Sterling_… I skim down the notice to the name on the bottom of the paperwork.

**Samuel S. Carson, pfc. Dod: August 27th, 1972  
Personal effects to be sent to designate listed above. No body re-patriation possible.  
See CO notification attached to be cc’d to designate with p.e.**

And, oh my love, I cannot breathe. I feel now exactly as I did then - there is no distance between these points for me. The fan cools my skin as it rotates, back and forth, back and forth. I don’t know for how long. Eventually, I flip the page to the letter from Sam’s commanding officer.

_Dear Mrs. Sterling,_

_I regret to inform you…_

I stop, skip to the bottom. They are forms with very little differentiation. The army likes consistency. Then I read:

_Madam, I know that nothing I can say will make this news any more palatable. But I would be remiss if I failed to mention that your brother died saving eight other men in his platoon. Those men are returning home as I pen this letter. They will live on because of Samuel’s superior loyalty to those by his side. The U.S. army encourages this but we cannot teach it. In this case, we certainly benefited from it and I am personally saddened that I cannot reward such service by sending your brother home to you._

I put the notice down and smooth it across the sticky wood with care. A voice speaks aloud, making me jump. It is my voice but I feel detached from it.

“Oh. That’s why.”

I will never know what Sam meant to tell me. I will never see him again. His smile no longer exists. This is the end of my association with my friend. I let go of the emotional attachment I have formed with him, as it no longer serves any useful purpose. Until I write this down for you, I will not purposefully think of him except for a single afternoon when I am stateside directly after my army discharge in January 1973. I go to the Dallas hall of records and look up homeowners on Sam’s street in his neighborhood. Then I go to the public library and ask for a current telephone book from Toronto, Canada. It takes a while. Then I find every Jeffrey with the corresponding last name of the family who lived down the street from Sam. There are five, and I call each number until I find the right one. I tell him that Sam is dead and that Sam spoke of him fondly. Jeffrey cries into the phone and I know, without words, that Sam was the love of Jeffrey’s life as well. I tell him I’m sorry and all I get in return is a barely audible _thank you for calling_. It will have to do and it was more than the army managed to achieve.

To me and the way I perceive time, Sam is always both dead and alive, and believe it or not, that comforts me. The importance of people is not their corporeal selves, but the neurochemical changes they affect in others. Sam changed me, and those changes are permanent. He lives in my consciousness, and I am not being figurative when I say this. Blanche lives there too, as do many others, both from here and other places. Sam is the first human I grieved for, but when that process was over I let it go. I’m sure Sam would be okay with that, and I have so much more ground to cover. I must not dwell, although you can never know the peculiar pain of experiencing someone and grieving them all at once as I do, my love. Be thankful for this.


	4. Chapter 4

We now skip to September 1991. I have watched America tear itself apart after the war. It is now a country struggling to find a new identity. No longer the paragon of righteous military might, it switches gears and becomes the center of global industry, technological research, and financial prosperity. At least that’s what the ads tell us.

The Cold War is over. The Berlin Wall comes down in 1990. Young people scorn the previous generation’s fear of annihilation when western media reveals the true state of people and countries that exist behind the former Iron Curtain. There is this opportunity - this human _moment_ \- when we see the Soviets as reflections of ourselves. They have families, they love, they laugh, they fear, they are curious… Hope is kindled in me that humanity will recognize the interesting spaces between the lines that define and separate them, that they will choose this moment to embrace as a species rather than continue on as isolationist nations. But it is not to be. People are still far too concerned with the ways in which they differ than all the ways they are the same. And because _different_ equals fear to so many, we ignore the things we should learn from and continue to fear one another. The moment is lost.

I live through Reganomics and conspicuous consumption, the birth of MTV, VCRs, and Cabbage Patch Dolls. I listen to the new American anthem: that greed is good, and I wonder if humanity has already achieved all that they can. Everything around me seems frivolous, a betrayal of the fear and loss I’ve already experienced during my stay. It takes some time before I admit that the war has stolen something from me. Perhaps I’ve lost my enthusiasm for this place…

I go to California and get a job at JPL. In the 80s, space exploration is the one point of national optimism for me, and after Vietnam, I know that I don’t have the stamina to resume top-secret weapons research. My skills are appreciated at JPL and until the Challenger disaster, it feels as though I am making a meaningful (if slightly ironic) contribution to humanity. After the explosion however, and the missteps that follow, NASA is slowly and quietly defunded until it becomes an interesting footnote in scientific history.

Black Monday happens along the way and the new American dream evaporates overnight. Greed is actually far from good, it would seem. People kill themselves over the loss of _things_ and _money_ , not other people. Then America invades Iraq for unfocused purposes and we watch it all live on TV. Paranoids believe that it is an attempt to stall a crippling recession by firing up the military-industrial complex back to its pre-Vietnam standards. Others believe we are there for the oil. I’ve always thought that we are still looking for our lost identity. But I live in the shadow of war so I do not trust my opinion on this. Some are afraid because they have never lived through a war before and don’t know what it means. Others settle in and wait to see what happens. All I see are the thousands of faces of the men who died on my table. I despair again, my dear. I want to leave this place - I don’t want another war in my memory. I am alone and I cannot find you. I wonder how long I must wait. It is torture to linger this way, without hope, without understanding…

But in October 1991 I attend an aberrant psychology lecture given by John Douglas at Berkley. It is not my field but I am intrigued by his insights, as well as the progress made in the science just in the time I’ve been here. Somewhere along the way I’ve lost sight of my investigation, and Mr. Douglas’s class that day brings it back into focus for me. I have allowed too much personal influence to cloud my project. Since I must wait for you anyway, I might as well put that time to good use. 

I resign from JPL just ahead of massive layoffs, and obtain a teaching position at CalTech in the mathematics department. This achieves two things at once. The first is that I have students and must interact with them thereby reducing my sense of isolation while also helping me gain further (and less personal) data for my work. The second purpose to my CalTech job is that it permits me the time and access I require to take on the study of my new obsession: psychology. I still appear as a twenty-five year old - a sought-after genius prodigy - and the university gives me whatever leeway I ask for in order to facilitate my stay with them. 

By 1997 I have my Master’s Degree and I successfully defend my doctoral thesis argument eighteen months later. I now have four doctorates to my name, but this is the only one I’ve earned. And, my love, I will not lie to you: I am proud of this. I never meet John Douglas in person, but he saved me that autumn day at Berkley. Human ennui gripped me tightly then, but his intellect and belief in the _science_ he was helping to shape rejuvenated me. That lecture sets me on a path that will eventually lead me to you. You know that I do not believe in a deterministic universe or linear time, but I will say that Douglas’s moment was a pivotal one, and I’ll leave it at that.

It is now May 2000. A new millennium, a new cause for hope maybe. I am content. I continue to teach and over time get better at it. I have a collection of colleagues who value me, and a smaller assortment of friends who enjoy me. During my psychology study, I meet a neuroscientist named Maeve and form a pair bond with her. Physically, she is plain and unassuming, but I’ve always viewed bodies as merely shells, so this doesn’t impact how I feel about her. Her mind is a tremendous, bright light that I am drawn to over and over again. This is the first time I’ve found myself compelled by the core of someone, and then discovered them from the inside out. I get lost in the uniqueness of this experience for a time, and it is here, my love, that I make my first significant interpersonal miscalculation. 

I believe that I am in love with Maeve, though I can tell you now, my dear, that love - real love - is never as airy or indistinct as a belief. It is something you know from the center of your bones on out when it happens, even if it’s never happened before. But in this moment, I do not understand this. I tell Maeve that I love her and she is overjoyed. We begin to make plans, and I am so lost in this bewildering experience that I do not realize I _do not want_ what she wants. She wants to get married, have children. 

The prospect of offspring snaps me out of my emotional haze a little. Raising a child with a human, while offering slightly more insight into the neurochemical complexities of species survival, does not further my investigation a great deal. The time investment alone could distract me from my work for years. Though I have been here for decades and have experienced many human impulses, I have no driving desire to procreate. I do not see the point. Also - and I tell this next part in the spirit of complete honesty, but it fills me with shame to admit it to you, my love - I look upon Maeve and see that she is not a biologically optimal specimen with which to create offspring. She has many chronic ailments and is frail, she is prone to depression and anxiety… She does not know this, but I do not find her especially arousing either. I go elsewhere to satisfy that, but always come back to her and her extraordinary intellect. I am addicted to that part of her and believe it should be more than enough. In short, and to use a turn of phrase from a friend I have yet to meet, I am a ‘shit’ boyfriend to her.

In time, her plans become more insistent. She refuses to allow me to brush her off. She wants what she wants and doesn’t understand my reluctance because I haven’t been mature enough to tell her that her plans appall me. 

I slip up, coming back to the apartment we share in Pasadena one day smelling like another man. She is far from stupid, but she mistakes the evidence at hand: she thinks I am a closeted homosexual. She cries - huge, wrenching sobs that bring tears to me as well - then she offers a compromise. She says she will be my beard, be my intellectual love and turn away from the knowledge that I fuck men to gain satisfaction. And this is the moment when I make my second interpersonal mistake. Because, instead of letting her believe that I am a gay man who loves her in every way but physically, I opt to tell her the truth instead, which I do not realize is far more cruel of me. I tell her that I’m not gay - I couple with whomever appeals to me - but sadly she no longer appeals to me. I tell her that I love her mind, that I love our existence together, but I have no desire to either change my behavior or have children with her. I thank her for her flexible and generous offer, and counter-propose that we both choose to continue on as we are while finding our physical outlets with others. Surely that is the most satisfying, considered solution in this scenario.

She does not think so. She goes to the bedroom and locks herself inside for three days. I can hear her crying as I listen crouched next to the door begging her to let me in. Eventually, I leave to teach a class and when I return both she and all of her belongings are gone. She leaves no note, and I have no idea where she is. I go to her department at the university to inquire after her and am told that she has taken an emergency leave. A week later Human Resources informs me that I have been removed as Maeve’s emergency contact and that I am no longer the beneficiary of her university insurance policy. None of these things matter to me in and of themselves, but when combined they fill me with a creeping sense of dread. And I do not want you to think I am completely heartless, my love. During this time, I ache for her as well. I can’t eat and I barely sleep at all - our bed is large and cold without her. I miss her brilliant light, I miss the way she hiccups when she laughs too hard - I make her laugh a lot. I miss the way we argue about what kind of eggs to buy in the supermarket, I miss the feel of her fingers against my scalp as she cuts my hair in our kitchen, I miss curling around her on the couch when we watch _Law & Order_, I miss the crease between her eyebrows when she marks papers…

We are apart one month, and then two. During this time I carry on with my schedule but my mind is constantly elsewhere. I understand the tremendous mistakes I’ve made with Maeve. I know that I can never have her back again, but I am desperate to find her, know that she’s safe, and to apologize if she will allow it. I try getting information from her colleagues and discover that her leave of absence has turned into resignation from the university. Someone thinks that she’s moved in with her parents in San Diego. I am devastated that I have damaged her and her career with unconsidered behavior and one, single callous conversation. I loathe myself and this addiction to pleasure that somehow never included her. 

Perhaps some laziness tags along with the loathing because I don’t try to find Maeve after she resigns, and in the end, she finds me instead. I come home after an evening lecture fours months after she left and discover that she’s broken into the apartment. And I tell you, my dear, I am overjoyed for an instant. The feeling is all-encompassing, like the first time we kissed each other. I think that maybe she’s back for good, that we’ll try again… But then I look at her - her ill-fitting clothes, her pale, blank expression, her unkempt hair - and my joy pops away. Dread quickly slinks into its place. I begin talking too quickly. I tell her I’m happy to see her, that I’ve been worrying, and I start to apologize.

“I haven’t come for that,” she interrupts, and I stop, waiting for more. She just stares at me.

“Why have you come?”

She smiles sadly and fumbles with her baggy clothes a little. “I loved you so much. I didn’t know it was even possible to feel as much as I did for you.”

She’s using the past tense and part of me feels uneasy about it but I don’t have time to consider it. I wonder what that feels like - the emotion she is describing…

“I love you, Maeve.” This is a stupid response. Of all the possible things I can say, this is the _least_ helpful. I have thought about this sentence for years.

She smiles again. “But not enough,” she says and then produces a revolver from her clothes. I do not understand what is happening for a split second. I’ve seen many guns - they do not frighten me - but I don’t know why Maeve has one in our home. Then, without another word, she places the muzzle under her chin and pulls the trigger. The sound of the shot and my scream happen at exactly the same instant. Then I’m on the floor next to her, pulling her body against mine and sobbing out a long noise that might be the word _‘no’_. It is a .45. The damage is catastrophic. She isn’t even recognizable now. The neighbors call the police and when they arrive they find me covered in snot and blood and brains, blubbering at Maeve as if it will ever make a difference again.

I grieve for the second human I’ve lost and it is so much worse than Sam because _I_ am the cause this time.

There are so many people I have met during my time here that have left me with something. Whether they were even aware of their contribution or not, so many have given me _more_. I have always been humbled and grateful for this, for those invaluable connections. Until Maeve, I never stopped to consider if I gave anything back. 

Does anyone think on me and mumble _‘thanks’_ out into the universe for something I did or said, either consciously or unconsciously? That’s not part of my job, it’s not why I’m here, but I know at least one person who was inalterably changed by my presence. I destroyed a life just by coming to this place. My inability to understand her - my alienness - my hubris at the experiences I’d already collected killed a life form who, by all rights, should’ve never met me in the first place. I extinguished something bright and beautiful, and even if our meeting were unavoidable, her death certainly would’ve been if I had been slightly more honest with her (or slightly less in a critical moment). The horror of what happened to Maeve has probably left the biggest impact on me in my time here. Even now, I feel an echo of the numbness that comes over me in the months after she dies. She is buried on a Tuesday in the rain, which is rare in southern California in the summer, and I feel nothing.

I want to feel _something_ , but for months and months it seems like too much effort. Then, I am grading papers in my office one day, correcting the same mistakes over and over again, and there is a tiny snapping sound. Whether this is real or imagined, I cannot say, but that snapping sound is part of me. What am I doing? Why do we make the same mistakes endlessly without changing? I have cocooned myself in this academic life. I have forgotten who I am. I am NOT human. I am NOT supposed to be comfortable here. This place is a location on my itinerary, not my destination. _Why am I here?_

I become angry, so angry. I have never felt such uncontrolled violence before, not in any of the hundreds of lives that I’ve already experienced. I am a professional - I have dealt with many unexpected extremes before - but humans excel at volcanic, senseless anger and the suddenness with which it descends over me leaves me a shaking victim to it.

The answer to why I am here is, of course, YOU, my love. And so my anger becomes directed at you. It is wholly unfair, I know. You did not kill Maeve. You do not know that I fell to this planet to find you. In 2000, you aren’t even _you_ yet, although neither one of us knows that. I don’t even know why I must find you - my mission is that vague - I only know that I cannot leave for my next assignment until I do. But I have been here so long already, much longer than usual, and perhaps humanity has transferred some of its impatience to me. I have never questioned my orders before, but this time I find I am frustrated by the shifting mists of possibility around me. I want _certainty_ , which is petulant and ridiculous, as well as a quantum absurdity. 

Perhaps it is a good moment to step away from this emotional chaos of mine to explain a little bit more about time. I’ve mentioned that time is fluid and flexible to me. This is because there isn’t just one universe. There are an infinite number of them all existing simultaneously and overlapping one another.

Take a moment and breathe, my love. Allow that idea to settle in.

Because there are infinite variations, some universes are almost identical to this one. Maybe one small thing has changed, like, chicken tastes like chocolate for example. The differences can be micro- or macroscopic. They can be important or utterly meaningless (though who makes those value judgments is a mystery to me). You need to understand this because with every choice we make in _this_ universe, ripples are felt in all of the others, and vice versa. It sounds like madness but you are already living in it and always have been. You do not feel the changes - they are instantaneous - but with every choice possibilities end at the exact instant that new ones are born because of that choice. This way the universe retains the exact same infinity of opportunity while also being infinitely flexible. 

Now that I’ve probably fried a few of your synapses with that, prepare yourself. Sometimes, I can ‘see’ the possibilities of choice at a given moment. Not all of them, mind you - that would be impossible to synthesize - but _some_ of them. It usually happens with a choice that involves an element that appears in a majority of the universes. ‘Seeing’ probably isn’t an accurate term because it doesn’t always involve vision and it almost never involves context. And I also only ‘see’ when I am in my native form, so, I haven’t ‘seen’ any of the outcomes of my decisions since I have become human. 

It is also important to clarify that I am not omniscient. I only see possible outcomes from choices that directly involve me. When I leave a place, I don’t know what happens after I’m gone, and I cannot see beyond my own lifespan. I do not have answers to the big questions: How did the universe begin? When will it end? What is its purpose? I don’t even have answers to the small questions, like: Why must I be here for you? Why are you important? How are you connected to me? All I know is that throughout my journey to this place, I had visions of you. Not just one, but multiple ones. Each time, each one was powerful and powerfully personal. It is my purpose to be here and to find you, and I would do it even if it weren’t my assigned task to do so. Perhaps that is why I was chosen.

But the visions constantly shift as choices are made, and then my human body prevents me from any further clarity, and I am marooned on this alien world with imperfect understanding searching for something that may be impossible to find while suffering from mistakes and indignities that I am unprepared for in complete isolation. So, a certain level of frustration is to be expected, no? I want you to know, my love, that the anger I feel is not for you. You are merely a more convenient target than the entirety of the multiverse. And this anger is _human_ ; it will pass. But in 2000, I am angry at absolutely every atom of reality. It isn’t a very productive time.

In May 2001, a man named Jason Gideon from the FBI gives a self-serving psychological profiling lecture at the university in an attempt to recruit some promising grad students to his Behavioral Analysis Unit. I am not part of the department, but the topic interests me and it has been a while since anything interested me. 

I am not in the best mood; I am confrontational and abrupt. But Gideon is quite possibly _worse_ at interpersonal discourse than I am and isn’t even slightly offended by me. In fact, he seems fascinated. He invites me for coffee and I am wary (I am cautious around every human now, secretly terrified that something as banal as coffee will leave a devastating impact on them. Not only am I not productive in this moment, but I am highly irrational as well.). Coffee turns into dinner and a five-hour discussion of Gideon’s work and some of his cases. There is absolutely no denying the instant crush I develop for aberrant psychology during the course of this evening. It is probably the only time in the last six months when I have been wholly focused on one thing. It’s like a narcotic and I am hooked on the first hit. Gideon smiles at the end of the meal like he realizes that he’s going to become my dealer. He offers me a job with the FBI that night, but I turn it down. The whole experience leaves me with this dangerous electric buzz all over - I want to say yes to him - but working in law enforcement will put me directly in the path of effecting individual outcomes. It’s a life and death business, and after what happened to Maeve, I can’t lie to myself and say that I’ll be any good at that. It’s too much responsibility and that is not my job. In fact, that is the exact sentence I use when I refuse Gideon. He just smiles thinly at me.

“Nobody _wants_ the damned job. But where would we be if we all made the same choice that you just made?”

“I’m an academic,” I counter. But I know how to fight, I’ve been to war, I’ve killed someone…

“I don’t need more brawn on my team,” he says tiredly. “I need more brains. We’ve been relying on brawn for two hundred thousand years, and where has it gotten us?”

I don’t like Gideon. He is reductive and arrogant. Maybe that’s what cements my refusal. We shake hands and part company but not before he makes me take his business card with a shark’s smile. I slip it into my jacket pocket and forget about it. This is not my responsibility.

It is September 11th 2001 and I am standing in the dean’s office at CalTech with the rest of the faculty watching a commercial plane crash into the second tower of the World Trade Center in Manhattan on his big screen TV. Nobody makes a sound. It is a warm early morning and the windows are open, and there isn’t a sound _anywhere._

I feel blank for a very long time. I watch the second tower collapse, I watch the fires, I recognize with sickening assurance long before the media confirms it that some of the things falling to the streets below are _people_ desperately trying to escape the flames, I watch as the news feed switches to the Pentagon and the smoking hole in the side of it, I watch the whole day until there is nothing but a burning crater and a choking pall of toxins at the center of one of America’s most cherished cities. 

My love, there is no way to adequately describe the horror of watching this in real time. I thought the war had shown me every form of creative degradation, but the sheer unexpectedness of this attack and the form it takes leaves me breathless. For all the bombastic blustering of the Cold War, the antagonism was always measured, and it was always acutely aware of the cost of escalation on both sides. There was always a pause before a decision because no matter how fervent the ideology, the considerations were rational - what did either side gain from it? But a religious conflict is the opposite of rational, and human history has shown time and again that people will do heinous things in the name of belief. There is no debate or consideration of what will be gained. There is only hatred and the drive to obliterate everything that is different from you. Humans frame this hatred as a matter of survival, and as I said before, it gets everyone into a lot of trouble.

I am different from every other organism on this planet. But I cry that day, mourning thousands of people I have never met and who are fundamentally alien to me like they are members of my family. The lines that separate me from them, or them from the attackers, or the attackers from horrified, fellow Muslims cease to exist. There is only the uncharted territory between those lines that needs to be explored so that we can come together and see that _we are the same._ We are all made of the same stuff: we are all stardust.

I go home, find the jacket in the back of my closet, and call the number on the forgotten slip of paper. It is late on the East Coast but I know he’ll be in his office.

“It’s a little busy here,” he snips at me. I still don’t like him but what the hell. I didn’t like the army either and I went to war for them.

“I want the job.”

“I thought it wasn’t your responsibility.”

“After today, it’s everyone’s responsibility.”

I give my notice at CalTech the next day and a month later I’m doing field agent training in Quantico, Virginia. I will become a behavioral profiler for the FBI. I will try to help people in my adopted home, even though I am _different_ and that difference will probably produce the exact hatred and fear I am hoping to fight if anyone discovers it. I will try to learn from my mistakes. I will try to do penance for Maeve. I will stop being pointlessly angry with you, my dear. You will appear when you appear, and no sooner. I will dive into this life and contribute. This is my only job now.


	5. Chapter 5

It is November 2003 and I have just failed my annual firearms recertification. I don’t know what happened. I made it through U.S. Army basic training and survived over two years in Vietnam. I even passed my initial FBI firearms tests. But I _failed_ , and now I have to collect the documentation of this failure and inform my superior about it. As I walk through the corridors of my workplace, I feel annoyingly insufficient. I’m here for my brains - everyone tells me this - but this simple, meaningless test is going to call my abilities into doubt. It has been many years since I’ve felt painfully awkward as a human, but my boss, Aaron Hotchner, can do it to me without even looking in my direction. 

Aaron is an extremely serious man. It rolls off him like physical waves whenever he walks into a room. I suppose that’s enough to give anyone pause, but even so I find my bumbling, twitchy reaction to it exasperating and thoroughly embarrassing. He says very little and expresses even less. He is intelligent, capable, and a little bit spooky with his insights. Upon our initial introduction he shakes my hand and just stares at me without expression. Then he tilts his head ever so slightly as if the angle changes _everything._ I am overwhelmed in this moment that he might actually _see_ I am alien. Then he asks if I would prefer the title ‘Doctor’ or ‘Agent’ in his quiet voice, and the moment passes. And that’s all that I really know about him after fourteen months of working for him. But even so, he’s far more pleasant than Gideon.

I reach his office and decide that _this time_ I will act like a proper FBI agent, and I knock on his open door. He beckons me in as he flips through a folder on his desk. I clear my throat and say ‘Sir’, which breaks halfway through the single syllable. I actually feel younger than my disguise of twenty-five years and I am pretty pissed off about this inconvenient, chronological impossibility.

“Stop calling me ‘sir’. I’ve told you that a thousand times.” He’s lying. It’s only been one hundred and forty-seven times. He looks at me. “What’s up?”

“Well, uhh, Si- I mean… here.” I shove the failure notice at him, and think about how lovely it would be to crawl into a small, dark hole right now. Aaron reads the paperwork and his brows crease in concern, or anger, or confusion - it could any of those because I’ve never seen him show this much to me before. It’s all new. Then he looks up again.

“You failed your firearms recertification.” He says it like it’s not possible, like I’m trying to convince him that the Earth is flat.

“Yes.”

“Why would you do that?”

I am confused. He thinks it was a choice? “Pardon?”

“You must have had a reason. You don’t do anything without a reason.”

I don’t? I’m finding him spooky again. I tell myself that there’s no way he can know anymore about me than I know of him, and because I am so much older I should assert a little authority over the quiet superiority he has established in our brief association.

“That is a ridiculous blanket statement that even one who knew me well should be hesitant in asserting. And you do not know me well.” It comes out quickly and sharply before I can consider the consequences. Aaron’s eyebrows rise. “I failed the test - I screwed up. People screw up sometimes.”

I want to tell him _‘I am people’_ because I’m still strangely worried that he thinks I’m not, but realistically, people never announce that they are people. It’s self-evident. Aaron stands behind his desk and gives me another unparseable expression. I try not to get any more frustrated than I already am. He simply nods and walks past me to the doorway.

“Come along,” he says without looking back.

Twenty minutes later we’re at the training range with goggles, earpieces, and a variety of weapons. I still don’t know what’s going on. Aaron looks up from checking his gun slide and catches me staring, and then he gives me the slightest of smiles. I mean, it is _fractional_ , but it nonetheless sets me on notice.

“I have firearms instructor status. I can override the certification determination if you can demonstrate ample skill that you will not pose a risk in the field. Now… show me your stance.”

I shake off the weirdness of the moment and do as I’m told. Then his hands adjust my grip, the brace of my arms, and the positioning of my feet. His skin is rough when it brushes mine and I wonder why because all I’ve really seen him do is file paperwork. His face is close to me as we check the site together; his shave is absolutely immaculate. When he turns to look at me I realize his eyes are the same color as Sam’s were and I close off a little as I veer away from that memory. He nods and stands back, and as he does a hint of his aftershave breezes across me like a sigh. I focus on the target and squeeze all of that out through the trigger. I score in the ninety-fourth percentile on the first try.

“I knew it,” he says quietly but nothing else. We move onto stationary targets at different distances, then multiple, timed targets, and finally a simulation of a hostile entry with specific target neutralization. I jog back to him when it’s done and he is making a looping signature at the bottom of a form on his clipboard.

“You’re approved for field work and your carry status is reinstated effective immediately.” He looks up at me and pauses. “You move like you’ve had combat training. But there’s no mention of that in your Academy paperwork.”

I can’t tell him about Vietnam; he thinks I’m too young. I shrug instead. “Too many Rambo movies as a child, I guess.”

His fractional smile returns and with it comes the familiar burst in my chest that I both love and loathe. I shove it away - I’m not indulging in that recklessness anymore. People just get hurt by it. And besides, Aaron isn’t the type.

“Rambo, huh? I guess I really don’t know you after all.”

It’s nothing - a throwaway line - but the spark of personality revealed that day on the training range becomes the fragile basis for an unlikely camaraderie. 

My love, as much as I try to protect myself from the intensity of human connections, I seem to be a sucker for friendships. They are perhaps the trickiest of relationships because they often change their nature without prior warning, and they _demand_ vulnerability, which is difficult for me to give. But the rewards - the satisfaction of them - are impossible to calculate. My job is lonely by nature. I’ve suffered from it from time to time, but never to the extent that I have while on Earth. It seems to be a flaw in the species: there are billions of you here, but you all feel so alone. You are too interested in the lines that separate you rather than the interesting places between those lines that I have mentioned before. So, I am lonely because I have no choice. But I learn that Aaron is lonely by design, like so many others of his kind. He has a wife he won’t confide in, friends that he keeps at arms length, and a family that he shuns. Why none of these rules seem to apply to me is something he keeps to himself. And as much as I try to be careful with him, I come to like him very quickly.

Aaron is one massive contradiction. He appears quiet and taciturn, but when he speaks he is thoughtful and everyone listens. His job is to apply judgment to others, and yet he is the most sympathetic person I know. He has been schooled in great violence, and yet his gentleness is so fundamental that it makes you fear for him just a little bit. He is stoic and fragile, serious and hilarious, reserved and fiercely passionate, noble and base, insightful and blind, patient and angry… In short, he’s mesmerizing. And all of this in turn makes him tremendously sexy.

I know, I know, my love. I’ve been down this road before, and I do everything I can to _recognize_ my attraction, but not act upon it. Part of that is because the ghost of Sam is there in Aaron’s eyes, even though these men are nothing alike. Part of it is the hatred I still carry with me for what I did to Maeve and my selfish drive for connection. Part of it is just a whispered _‘you know better’_. But he smiles for me all the time, and that really hits me hard when I realize that he _doesn’t_ do that for anyone else. I tell myself it’s fine to have affection for him as long as he never knows about it. Funnel it into the friendship, and I do. We have lunch together, we attend the occasional professional conference, I volunteer for his recruiting lectures, we sit together and talk about anything that comes to us when we’re on the road and can’t sleep, on a handful of holidays I go to his home for a meal with him and his wife… It’s all working out well until Georgia.

It is December 2005 and I am digging my own grave at gunpoint. A day earlier, I died, much to my surprise. But then I am brought back again. I have been under the influence of a powerful opiate for days - I am finding it hard to determine if any of this is real. I cannot see your face anymore, my dear, and that terrifies me more than the torture I’ve endured or the ever-ripening possibility that I may actually die here as a human. I force myself to see all of the faces I have encountered since 1959. I identify them one by one and say goodbye. The act has no purpose other than to keep me awake and to remind me of who I really am. Aaron’s face is the last one I call up. I sent him a message - at least I think I have - but he’s only here inside my head. I tell him that I like him so very much, that I’m glad we were friends, and that he is important. I hope he won’t be too upset when I die. 

The man holding the gun on me makes a mistake, and then there is a shot, and then Aaron is clutching me close because I can’t stand upright on my ruined foot. I still don’t know what happened, or if any of this is real. But I feel Aaron’s breath against my neck - it is wet and irregular and it works out of his chest in great heaves. Finally, he asks if I’m okay and I mumble something that apparently satisfies him. My foot is a mess and I almost instruct him on how to field dress it before I catch myself. That would’ve been hard to explain later. I must avoid these drugs - they are dangerous to my very existence here. I have a syringe in my pocket that I stole from the man who planned to kill me. I took it because this disorientation is blissful. After decades of secrecy and searching, I can give up. And not the way I gave up when Maeve died - it is not oppressive numbness - it is not hiding. It is freedom, a release. I am happy and warm under the sun dozing my life away. I want this, my love, I want it so much. Life here seems unusually hard and I want to stop giving a shit about everything.

I fumble in my pocket and wrap Aaron’s fingers around the syringe. He looks at it, and then looks at me, and his eyes do something to me.

“I’m going to need help.”

He just nods and then we both watch as he depresses the plunger and empties the syringe into the grave I dug for myself.

“Always,” is what he whispers, and it is a promise he’s never broken. I have never had a better friend than Aaron Hotchner, my love. Remember that.

It is June 2006 and Aaron and I have just narrowly escaped being killed inside a federal prison of all places. No one seems to notice the ironies of this job as much as I do. It’s Aaron’s fault, or at least he thinks so, and I know him too well to try and talk him out of it. By way of an apology, he explains that his wife has left him and I have no idea what to say. I ask him what he wants, going quietly crazy in the car seat next to him, and then he annihilates that feeling by saying what he wants he’s not going to get. I choke it all down and tell him I’m sorry, maybe there’s still a chance. I tell him to think positive as I focus on the trees blurring past us on the highway. 

I want to get high. It comes from out of nowhere and it completely rules my world in the silence of the SUV. I think about the ancient neurochemical reward system inside me that has its wires crossed. I think about how powerful it is because even though I understand its process and why it is happening, I can’t control it. I am an addict in more than one way, apparently, and I wonder why this behavior has never surfaced in any of my previous incarnations. And then I feel remorse about the judgment I’ve cast over this species about their inability to control the instincts that are always on the verge of destroying them.

I am a fucking hypocrite.

We go to the hotel and pack up. I can’t look at Aaron for fear that he’ll see any of this. Aaron always sees.

“You’re quiet.” His voice is so soft it makes my pulse pound in my throat. I want to rise above all of this and turn around to comfort him because I _know_ that voice, and it means that he’s hurting. As his friend, I should be able to deal with that. But I can’t. I shrug instead. 

“I said I was sorry,” he continues.

“That’s not important-” 

I turn to face him not realizing that he’s right behind me. Our noses bump and we both just freeze in place. I am right: his expression is absolutely ruined and I wish I could do something about it, but I speculate only his wife can manage that now. I don’t know her well - I don’t know if it’s worth trying to convince him to fight for her. I probably spend more time thinking about this than necessary in order to distract myself from his open mouth just a few inches from me, his breath breezing across my collar. And then his lips close over mine, and the pull of them is urgent. 

I know what you must be thinking, my dear, but this is all very shocking to me. I tried my best, and I was sure of Aaron. I was _sure._ But his hands grip my face too tightly as he pushes for more with a heartbreaking moan. My fingers clasp his wrists as I try to pull away. I cannot do this to him. I cannot let down my friend when he needs me. We part with an awkward little pop and he stares at me refusing to let go. I scramble for something to say - I have to be careful because I’m not good at this - but he beats me to it.

“Is there still a chance?” he whispers.

“For your wife?” Pain squeezes my chest as I say it, and then I see the same pain ripple across Aaron’s face. He shakes his head.

“No. For you.”

Me? I release his wrists and then my decision-making processes just _stop._

“Am I mistaken? Did I get this all wrong?” he asks. He looks terrified. I have never seen Aaron this scared before. I am overwhelmed by what that terror hints towards.

“You didn’t get it wrong.”

He hesitates for another moment. “Is it the job? I realize that I’m being wholly inappropriate here and there’s no walking this back-”

“It’s not the job, Aaron.”

“Well, then… was it only a fantasy? Something you never intended to-”

“I am a problem for people, Aaron, not a solution. _That’s_ my history. Trust me - I’m not something you want.”

“You’re wrong. You’re exactly what I want. Let me show you.”

I’m not going to say I put up any sort of fight after that statement. I guess I’m not that noble. The truth of it is that I want him: his mind, his body, and every molecule of his attention. An organism cannot own another organism. Partnerships can occur. Conflicts happen, absolutely. But ownership lives in the mind - it is not a function found amply in the natural world. I want to _own_ Aaron Hotchner. He is my friend, he holds the key to my fascination, and he helplessly arouses me in every sense of that word’s definition. I want to curl him into me and absorb him into my cells. I want to carry him with me no matter where I go - that’s how much he possesses my thoughts. I do more than miss him when he is absent. I plot and scheme and wonder until we meet again. It is basically insanity. He is Sam’s unexpected, simple attraction and Maeve’s intellectual incandescence. He is the warm sun I am laying beneath dreaming my life away. 

I have fallen in love with a human for the first time.

I feel a little guilty about it in June 2006 (he is still married, after all) but as of the writing of this tale, I feel nothing but joy at it. He is not the last person I will love before I leave this place, but my insane love for him is as equal now as it was in the beginning. And that is an impressive feat considering all it has withstood. Should you feel the need to tell him this, my dear, I won’t mind. He’d probably be too polite to ask about it anyway, and he deserves to know. 

But loving Aaron isn’t easy and never has been. The glorious contradictions that compel me to him are the very things that have made me want to throw up my hands and walk away from him in disgust so many times. Despite the amazing, desperate mess we make of each other in that hotel room on that first night, he does everything he can to save his marriage. This is as offensive to me now as it was then, and just as mysterious. He also refuses to admit that he is in a relationship with a male until it is almost too late. There are some things that even I can’t get him to talk about. The enduring legacy of his marriage is one of them. 

At first, I think his commitment to both me and his dying marriage is about experimentation. While I have never paid a lot of attention to the gender rules human society has created, I have witnessed the great strife they cause. I do not take them lightly, and I understand that Aaron’s sudden interest in another man is shocking and potentially damaging to his career. I also understand the power of attraction, and that sometimes you fall victim to it without much of substance beneath it. For a while, I think that Aaron is with me simply for these reasons. It seems like a passing curiosity that he can’t control, and his persistence with Haley indicates just how transitory he thinks it is. And even considering that and how much these thoughts hurt me, I let him have what he wants. I cannot adjust how I feel about him (though I’ll admit to you, my dear, that I try, even after the fall). And what’s worse, I cannot tell him how I feel. I cannot articulate the way it psychologically slices me open when he smiles at me, quiet and luminous in my bed with the night sweat cooling across our skin, and then he rushes to leave before daylight, or collapses into himself when Haley’s lawyer delivers new papers, or when he calls me ‘Doctor’ with colleagues like he’s forgotten my name. I told you before, my love, that Aaron is my best friend, and he is. But it is also true that no one has hurt me more.

In March 2007 Aaron’s divorce is finalized and he drags me out on a drinking ‘bender’ that should have come with a warning. I am not prepared for either the damage done to my liver or the messy collapse of his emotional scaffolding. I watch as he sinks deeper and deeper into self-loathing melancholy about the loss of his wife, and I suppose I’ve had enough to drink to skip over the conversational filters that have kept me in check (and miserable) for so long. I ask him why he wants me to see any of this, why he’s exposing me to the obvious love he holds for another. My tone is accusatory and bruised, and there’s no hiding it from him. When he looks at me, his grief-stricken expression becomes all-consuming, like a net thrown over him that will trap him forever. 

“How can I ever love you well enough when I’ve failed her so completely?”

It is the first time he’s said the word ‘love’ to me.

“You failed her _because_ of me,” I slur back, hating myself.

“No,” he grabs my arm, and then my jaw, too tightly and yanks me closer. “No, Haley and I were over long before the Hardwick interview.”

“Then why all of _this?_ The months of guilt and hiding and hand-wringing?”

“Because,” he huffs and it comes out dangerously wet. “She didn’t do anything wrong. All she did was love me, but I pushed her away… wouldn’t let her in even though I loved her too.” His hand tangles into my hair that’s a shade too long for FBI standards. “And I love you so much more than I loved Haley. How do I stop the same thing from happening again?”

I weave and blink in his grip in stunned silence. It has never once occurred to me that he feels this way; I have always assumed that the emotions were one-sided. In this moment, my love, I realize that we’ve failed each other in this respect.

“So… it isn’t just… an affair?” I ask clumsily, still finding it difficult to comprehend. Then he’s standing too quickly making the bar stool clatter behind him as he pulls me in and his mouth closes over mine. It’s a Thursday evening in a popular downtown bar, and he doesn’t care who sees us. A tremendous wave of energy rips through me that I will later identify as joy, and I grip him back too fiercely, pushing for more, for answers and commitments, for _him._

The bartender complains about the display and tells us to take it outside, and we do. It’s cold and we’re not dressed for it, but we cling to each other and our excited breathing makes frosty clouds in the evening around us.

“Don’t push me away, Aaron.”

“What if it happens anyway? What if it’s just how I’m built? I don’t know how to do this.”

I want to tell him that I don’t know how to do this either, that I’ve never felt this way, this intensely, in any life before this one. I want to tell him how disorienting it is, how scared I am because he’s different - he’s _alien_. I want to say that documenting the human experience is part of my job, but experiencing _him_ doesn’t feel like that. And I can’t tell him that I’m afraid of how this feeling might distract me from finding you, my love, and that is the whole reason why I’m here. How can I ever admit that he might just be a dangerous mistake?

In the end, I just tell him that I love him, and I put all of myself into that verb when I say it: the alien, the disguise, the fear, and the long, lonely journey to get here. He kisses me deeply as we stand shivering on the snowy sidewalk but he doesn’t know the depth of what I’ve just admitted to. He doesn’t know that I suddenly see my existence as ‘lonely’ where I didn’t before, and now I’m hoping to relieve that state by reaching out to a creature who has _designed_ himself to be lonely.

You see, my dear? Friendship and love will almost always drive you crazy with their impossibility.

Things are all right between us for a time. Better than all right, actually. While Aaron never ‘comes out’ officially, he no longer acts as if we’re professional strangers at work. During one of Garcia’s parties, Rossi discovers us making out in a quiet corner, and after that Aaron doesn’t put a lot of effort into hiding the fact that we’re together. I’m sure that Dave has a hand in the smoothness of that transition, but neither man ever tells me the details of it. So we work and play together, and I sink under the swell of the one I love nearly losing myself in the endless tide of him. I don’t understand how much danger I am in; I give myself over completely thinking that we’re past the hurting. I ignore my mission and my better judgment for a time, instead reveling in our life of mysteries and justice and _humanness._ But that’s the nature of addiction, and eventually whatever high you’re on comes to an end. Reality is far less euphoric.

George Foyet is another aspect of Aaron that I do not fully understand. He and Aaron have a hold over one another that is powerful but also completely unique because it is fuelled exclusively by hate. I don’t believe I’ve ever seen Aaron truly hate anyone except him. Since he probably will never tell you this story, I will (or at least the part of it I know). During our careers together we hunted a killer known as The Reaper. George Foyet came forward and claimed to have survived a Reaper attack and became personally connected to Aaron through the investigation. It turned out that Foyet _was_ The Reaper and when we targeted him, he targeted Aaron. 

You’ve seen the scars on his stomach…

I can’t, my love, I’m sorry. I thought I could retell this dispassionately, but… Aaron almost died - that’s all you really need to know about that.

George Foyet becomes Aaron’s white whale. The attack Aaron survives is the thing that inextricably binds them. I’ve always felt that Foyet loved Aaron in his own way and the attack was the consummation of that love. I usually throw up after thinking this but I still believe that it is psychologically and behaviorally valid. Aaron, if you ever read this: I apologize, but the scientist in me won’t allow me to ignore a truth for too long. Whatever existed between them, it ends up taking over.

Aaron takes a long time to recover from his injuries, and in the process pushes me away, violating his pledge to learn from his past. His attempts to put distance between us are clumsy and hurtful. That behavior alone should tell me that there are other motivations behind it all, but I’m too shocked by his sudden reversal to look at things logically. You see, my love, I let my defenses down - I was open to him. He could come and go as he pleased, and I wasn’t prepared for the eventuality of him ever actually _going._ Considering who I am and the role I play in this narrative, this is an inexcusable blind spot.

Aaron is attacked in November 2008, and by April 2009 we are barely on speaking terms with one another. I keep trying. I go to his apartment and make sure he’s taking his medications, going to physical therapy, and eating regularly. I run errands for him. I give him notes from the cases we’re working in his absence. I give him updates on the team and the neverending politics of the Bureau. And he just seems to resent me for it more each day. 

“Just… stop talking,” he snaps one day as I unload the groceries I bought him. “You know, I’ve never once asked you to come over. Isn’t it obvious by now that I don’t want you here?”

I solidify in place, a bag of frozen peas dripping in my hand. He’s red-faced, scowling, and he can’t make eye contact. We haven’t touched each other in affection for months, and I can’t recall the last time I saw his smile. I am assailed by this crushing feeling over every inch of my body, as if the molecules are collapsing back into infinitesimal oblivion all at once. And then I can see Maeve as clear as day in my apartment in Pasadena looking at me with pity as she says _‘I didn’t know it was even possible to feel as much as I did for you’_. So this is how that feels: rejection.

“You don’t have to ask. That’s not what we’re about. I’m just trying to care for you-”

“Jesus, don’t you understand? This isn’t working anymore. Things have changed - _I’ve_ changed. I want you to leave. Now. And don’t come back.”

I want to ask him why but I’m afraid his answer will be as honest and devastating as mine was to Maeve. And, my love, I am too small and fragile in this instant not to follow Maeve down her path if Aaron is honest. Things have been wrong for months but I don’t know how they switched from great to something increasingly less. I can’t identify the precipitating incident…

“This is just a bad day. It’ll pass.”

“Get out!” He bellows at me, which is a first, and then he winces and rubs his abdomen. “Seriously, we’re done. Don’t make me repeat it.”

I place the half-melted bag of peas on the countertop and spend a moment staring at them. I can’t feel anything beyond the humiliation of this scene; my worthlessness, so succinctly stated by one I love, becomes my whole existence. I turn without looking at him, croak out a tiny _‘Fine’_ , and leave as quickly as I can, my key making a hollow clinking sound as I leave it in the bowl next to his by the front door. I never go back. I will not be Maeve - I will never return to the scene of this unspeakable crime.

Aaron returns to work a month later and we are strangers to one another. I diminish a little more each time I see him, and everyone notices. During this time of painful self-reflection, I think of you, my love. I realize I’ve lost my way again, and I once more reach out for you to be the string that pulls me back to my center. I have a job - a mission - and Aaron Hotchner was never a part of it. You were always the only one I ever saw in my visions.

Foyet doesn’t stay away for long. Aaron’s been back at work for a couple of months when Foyet issues a threat against Haley to catch Aaron’s notice again. And like a dog after a bone, Aaron goes straight for him. 

At this point I’m bitter. It’s not just that I’m on the outside, or that Foyet has decided that Aaron’s vulnerability is his ex-wife and not me. It’s not even that playing out an abusive, psychological mating dance with George Foyet is more important to Aaron than any other aspect of his life. The majority of my bitterness comes from the fundamental disappointment I feel for the man I love. It’s hard to write this down, my dear. These words come at a price for me, but I will not sugar coat the moment. You deserve as true a tale as I can offer.

George Foyet kidnaps Haley and kills her as he forces Aaron to listen to it. Then Aaron kills Foyet with his bare hands. And as horrifying as the end of this sad scenario is, I feel as though Aaron lets us all down. Foyet’s motivations are so transparent, and yet Aaron falls for it all. In the final moments, he is no better than any of the humans we’ve chased down for similar, pointless violence and brutality. Killing Foyet does nothing to atone for Haley’s murder, and it is _exactly_ what Foyet wants. In my eyes, Aaron gives up, becomes less, sliding into the ancient skin of survival and revenge that plagues everyone. He isn’t the luminous, complicated man I adore. I almost hear a snapping sound as I feel myself detach and float freely from this notion of him. Everyone gathers around him like a shield wall, but I am just numb.

This is probably terrible for you to read, my love. I know that you adore him as well. But here is another insight I have learned while being human: these awesome moments that feel so complete and immovable when you experience them do not remain that way in time. Perspective changes almost everything. So, always keep your eyes open for new data, dear. You never know how it will change your conclusions.

After Haley and Foyet’s deaths, Aaron reaches out to me but I am having none of it. I can feel his tentative circling again, like it was in the beginning, but I ignore him. There is no point in fighting for love - look at what we do with it. We get close to each other and then cut one another wide open and watch ourselves writhe. It is torture and I refuse to participate. 

I spend my time elsewhere, with others, searching for you and continuing the work at the Bureau. Aaron’s frustration with me is apparent but subdued, and somehow that irks me even more and encourages me to continue ignoring him like an idiot. In a peevish way I feel that if he wants to make amends it should be big and obvious, which is everything that Aaron is not. I do not see that underneath all of this childishness is the _opportunity_ I’m offering to him to make amends in the first place. Such layers of unnecessary complication…

It is November 2009 when I wake on the jet flying back from a case on the West Coast and find Aaron staring at me in the dim light of the cabin. Everyone is asleep exhausted from the two-week case, but Aaron is wide awake and focused on me with a sniper’s gaze.

“What?” I ask as grumpily as I can.

“I was trying to keep you out of it,” he mumbles sadly. “Maybe there was a better way, but…”

I don’t want to talk about this and I’ve been very successful at dodging the conversation for months. I resent that he’s cornered me to get his way. “If this is about us-”

“It’s always been about us,” he whispers as he leans forward and every inch of him practically leaks with a plea for me to listen to him. “I knew he’d come for me again and again, any way he could. It was just a matter of time until he chose to make the assault personal.”

“Are you… are you telling me that you _anticipated_ him targeting Haley?” I won’t believe this of Aaron; I won’t believe that he used his ex-wife as bait.

“No, I honestly didn’t. We were divorced - she was out of my life. I thought she’d be safe. You, on the other hand…”

And that sentence feels like a sobering slap across the face. I can’t breathe let alone speak.

“I just wanted to keep you safe.” His voice barely makes any sound as he says it and it’s almost lost in the ambient noise in the cabin. “It was bad enough that he took Haley. I-I miscalculated… I’ll have to live with that forever. But, if he’d taken you… if it had been you saying goodbye to me over the phone that day… I wouldn’t have survived that. I wouldn’t be here now.”

“Aaron…”

“I know I’ve let you down. You’ve always expected more of me, and I’ve always strived to be more because of that. But after he killed Haley, I _had_ to end him. He’d just keep coming - it would never stop until one of us was destroyed. And I _had_ to survive because I wouldn’t let him have you. You’re… you’re everything. I’ll live with your disappointment and indifference at what I’ve done - that’s fine. It’s all fine because _you’re still here._ ”

His hand lands gently across one of mine. He’s not really asking for anything; it’s more like a reckoning. And I just stare at him as I readjust my expectations around the knowledge he knew what Foyet was up to, he planned for it, and that he didn’t kill out of mindless rage. His choices were considered, the consequences of them accepted. It is Aaron through and through. You see, my love, Aaron has never, ever actually let me down, even though I have doubted that more than once.

I swallow all of that down and murmur, “Okay.” It’s all I can make myself do on the jet that day, but it’s another beginning. He has taught me pain and surprise, and he has also shown me that I can be just as petty and small as anyone else. More barriers have fallen and my unwinding continues, but miraculously the love remains. We turn a corner together.


	6. Chapter 6

As I get closer to your appearance in this story, my love, I come to another inescapable thread in the unravelment: Emily Prentiss. Please forgive that now the chronology of this will get a little confusing as I leap around to tell her part of it, but rest assured it all comes together in the end. 

I can say in complete honesty that Emily is the most physically beautiful woman I’ve met, and if I ever said that to her face she’d roll her eyes, utter something unrepeatable, and stomp away in fundamental displeasure at my obtuse, male nature. _This_ is why she’s so wonderful. Her extraordinariness is something indefinably internal - an essence - and it just so happens that it comes with a breathtaking external casing. 

Emily is the epitome of a woman of her generation: strong, driven, passionate, intelligent, career-focused, and independent to a fault. Even in the new millennium these attributes aren’t always appreciated; there is a backlash against the advances of feminism in the 2000s that perplexes me, and as religious conflicts escalate, there is a small but determined movement within them to claw back the equality between the sexes that was so hard won a few generations earlier. Perhaps this explains why Emily is so fiercely herself and so alone when we meet. And it probably also explains why Aaron has a hard time with her in the beginning. He’s not a man with a limited view in that way, but there’s no denying that he is more comfortable with women like his wife than with women like Emily.

When we first meet I am going through my inexplicable awkward phase and that should’ve been enough to put Emily off. But we become friends quickly and far too easily. I remember thinking at the time that there was something familiar about her, like something of a half-formed dream, but then shook it off as the scientist in me reasserted control. She joins the team shortly before Aaron and I begin, and all of us seem to travel forward and back in this time in tandem, sometimes stumbling out of rhythm and then rushing to catch up again. I didn’t know that this would all work out as it has - I had no clue at all. The linear illusion of time makes these sorts of things seem clearer, but that’s not how it actually happens: life isn’t a straight line, my love. The paths of Aaron and Emily were never that obvious.

It’s shortly before New Year’s Eve 2006 and Aaron has been reckless: he’s spent a whole weekend with me and is trying to stretch out every last second of it as we make out like teenagers in the front foyer of my apartment building on a cold night. We come up for air and he smiles - such a smile, my dear, you’ve seen it - and I return it in spades because when it works between us nothing else exists except the distance separating him from me and how quickly I can erase it. But then I see someone staring through the entry doors and Aaron turns as my smile fades. Emily is there, trying to tamp down her shock as only a diplomat’s daughter can, and then she shrugs and saunters into the foyer, refusing to give into the gracelessness.

“Well, this explains some things…”

“Does it?” Aaron is suspicious of her, suspicious of the motives she’s been openly accused of. But I know better. Even without proof, there’s something about Emily that I inherently trust. “What are you doing here, Prentiss?”

She arches an eyebrow at Aaron and wordlessly tells him to stow the attitude, which is impressive considering he’s her boss and he’s cornered, which doesn’t bring out the best in him. “There’s a showing of Solaris in the original Russian down at the Trimark. I came by to see if he wanted to tag along. But he’s _busy_ , so…” She’s talking to Aaron but looking at me, and there’s something in that look. Even now I can’t define it, but I get the feeling that the whole scene is making her sad in a subconscious way.

“It was nice of you to think of me,” I say, because it is and I suddenly want to go with her. “Rain check?”

“Sure.” She shrugs and heads back out into the cold like it’s nothing. In my arms, Aaron tenses.

“I was never here,” he calls after her, and then I stiffen at the implication. She says, “ _Who_ was never here?” into the winter sky and doesn’t look back. And from that instant on, I never see the point of actively lying to her. It takes Aaron a few more years to learn to trust her the way I do, but perhaps that’s how it has to happen for them. All I know is that I’ve always trusted her.

We’re on a stakeout together three months later and it’s hot and boring and I need to pee but refuse to admit any of this to Emily as she pushes her way into hour seven of serenely staring at an inactive house down the street. Sometimes I’m an excellent FBI agent, but today isn’t one of those times. I start to fidget in the seat beside her again and she just launches into it without warning.

“Be careful with Aaron.”

I turn my head so quickly that my neck spasms in complaint. She’s still staring at the house. “How long have you been waiting to say that?”

She shrugs, again like it’s nothing. 

“Is it because he’s married?” I ask. She shakes her head ‘no’.

“Because he’s older?” Again, ‘no’.

“Because he’s my superior? Do you think he’s taking advantage of me?” I have to keep reminding myself of how young I appear to everyone. Sometimes it’s exhausting.

“It would be quite a feat for someone to take advantage of you.” She looks me straight in the eye when she says it, and I wonder _how_ I appear to her. Most people on the team want to protect me, but that isn’t what’s happening here. “Listen, I don’t know what your relationship is about, but I do know both of you and neither one of you would start this on a whim. I’m just worried about it, okay? I’m your friend and I’m worried.”

“Thank you for being my friend.” I say it softly and mean it with every inch of myself. Emily offers me her friendship as freely as Martin Polonovski offered me his hand in 1959, and I am still humbled by it. “But don’t worry about it. Aaron loves me.”

“He loves you _now_. But he’s going through some shit - the kinda shit that changes people.”

“You think I don’t know that? You think I don’t know that love statistically doesn’t remain stable between a couple?” I try not to think of Maeve in this moment.

“This isn’t a theory. You can’t prepare for the negative outcomes, trust me on this. I… I’m afraid of what this will do to you if he walks away from it. I can see how much it means to you.”

I am amazed by how much she cares, that she doesn’t condemn it or diminish its importance like I expect her to. She’s just worried about my heart. She doesn’t know that Aaron isn’t the caustic variable in this equation - she doesn’t understand the danger _I_ pose. I surprise her when I reach out and pull her in for a hug, both of us trapped by out seatbelts, all elbows and chins.

“That’s not the issue. The problem is: what happens _to him_ when I walk away?”

“You won’t,” she gasps.

But I will. It is inevitable. Every day Aaron gets older and every day I stay exactly the same. One day I will walk away from all of them. It will not be a choice and none of them will ever understand it, especially Aaron. I have accepted that this is the price I pay for intimacy, but there is a price for everyone else as well. I’m not strong enough to spare these good people from it.

“It won’t be… It won’t happen because I want it to,” I try to explain as obliquely as possible. It almost feels like I’m saying my eventual goodbye to her now, and my stomach forms a tight, psychosomatic knot at that idea. “That’s just how things work out with me.”

She stares at me like she finally ‘gets it’ even though she doesn’t. She probably thinks that I’m neurotic or insecure. But then she says something that pierces right through me and buries its way into the creature I am beneath the muscle, bone, and viscera. 

“You’re so old - you’re the oldest twenty-five year old I’ve ever met. And you’ve been alone forever, haven’t you? Don’t you ever get tired of it? The waiting to be alone again?”

Oh, my love, in the silence that follows that statement I almost tell Emily everything. Somehow she found me. She poked around with her keen profiler’s brain and accidentally found a truth so hidden that I didn’t even see it myself. All this time I’ve been saying how lonely humans are. But my existence is no better, even in this moment when I am so in love. I travel from place to place, live different lives, and then jettison them like changing clothes. The experiences serve a greater purpose, sure, and I have the memories with me, but it isn’t the same thing as being _connected._ Even in my beginning when I only know my own kind, my own world, connection isn’t a part of me, not the way humans do it. Human relationships are loud, distracting, and vibrant - there’s nothing quite like it. I’ve watched stars explode, I’ve seen asteroids hit planets and destroy the organisms on it that I’ve spent ages of my life studying. I once spent millennia observing an anemone on a dying world struggle to grow up out of its stagnant home, reach to the atmosphere that will kill it, and push its genetic essence into space. It was almost religiously beautiful and I treasure it like so many other memories. But that anemone died, as did its descendents, and I did nothing to stop it. I felt no grief at their loss. I have never been connected to anything until I came here: somehow, humanity infected me with it. Now, I feel the terror of my impending loneliness, and yes, I am tired of waiting for it to happen. I have no idea how I will negotiate leaving this place when the time comes.

How Emily _sees_ this in me remains a mystery. I’ve never asked her about it. Perhaps you should, my dear. I’ll bet it’s a fascinating answer.

So, in this way, Emily becomes indispensable to me. She never questions my relationship with Aaron again but I know that she keeps an eye on it. I don’t mind - it’s quite comforting - and it helps that someone other than Aaron and I knows this secret. It makes me less resentful and probably prolongs the relationship until he gets to a place where he can accept it. Who knows? He and I might not have made it without her. 

She and I spend a lot of time together, both on and off the job. It feels as though we are mutually fighting our loneliness fatigue together, but neither one of us ever says this aloud. As much as I crave Aaron, Emily is more comfortable to me. We can, and often do, talk about anything. Sometimes the results of those conversations are startling, perception-altering. Sometimes she is combative with me - she challenges me to look beyond what I think I know. She prods my curiosity. But when unpleasantness arises between us, it never lasts. We ‘hug it out’ (that’s her term and it’s very apt - she’s a great hugger when she puts her mind to it). We watch old movies, and dress up like superheroes and run around our apartments like the juveniles that I have never been. We go to zoos in the different cities we travel to and act like the animals we see. I try to ignore the irony of their cages and just give into the moment. She shows me how to roller skate and then we do it in the Smithsonian together as the guards chase after us. We agree that we have to try it at the Guggenheim in New York because it’s circular and slopes downwards. I teach her to draw and she laughs at the way I see things. It doesn’t bother me because her laugh makes me laugh, and because I know she finds what I draw interesting. That is her gift: Emily teaches me freedom. If Aaron is the friend that I absolutely depend on, Emily becomes the friend who makes me _better._ I don’t think I adequately understand the breadth of the term ‘friendship’ until she arrives in my life. Through my ups and downs with Aaron, the horrors of the job, and the terrible moments of self-doubt in between, Emily is always by my side. She is a marvelous human and because she hates compliments so much, I’ve never been able to tell her so.

So when we find ourselves separated from our team and taken hostage by a religious psychopath on his militia-like compound, my actions should come as no surprise. Although they do, especially to Emily and me. 

The cult leader is a homegrown version of the religious extremism that brought me to a standstill that fall day in 2001. He only sees lines and categories and exclusion. Almost no one is acceptable to him, not even his own followers, and especially not government representatives bent on questioning his righteousness. He is hurting people and he’ll never stop. It is my job to end that, and I do not doubt my intention to make that happen. But it isn’t until he turns on Emily that it becomes irrevocable.

She is taking a beating from this man that is meant to save all of us - me, her, and everyone still barricaded inside the compound. But as she falls to the floor and the man begins kicking her with mindless intensity, I know he’s not going to stop. She told me not to interfere a split second before she was grabbed up and slugged so hard that it made a sickly, wet sound in the room, but… _he’s going to kill her._

He doesn’t care about the consequences of it. He doesn’t care because he’s going to kill all of us as well when he’s done.

Now, I have killed out of neglect and passivity, but never on purpose, with my own hands and malice of forethought. But that volcanic human rage that I’ve mentioned before takes me in this moment, and it is so quick and replete that I do not stand a chance against it. I tackle this creature that I can honestly say I no longer view as human, and slam us both into a wall away from Emily. I am taller than him, though not stronger, but I have the element of surprise. He did not ever see me as a threat. That surprise is his final expression as I pin him down and smash his head against the tile floor over and over until he makes his own wet noises and then goes limp. I do this in front of everyone, in front of children, my love. I stare down into his sightless eyes looking back at me, and all I think is, _‘Good’_. 

Emily is calling my name. She is scared - I have scared her. But when I look up I see a follower in a suicide bomb vest glaring at me with tears streaming down her face. Even though the man I killed was not human to me, he is human to her and she will have her revenge. You see, my love, this cycle never ends. If left to our instincts alone, we will murder ourselves into oblivion. This is an important realization that I stow away for later. Right now, we’re all still about to die.

I yell for everyone in the meeting hall to run. Some do, others don’t. In that moment, I don’t care what happens to them. I grab Emily and yank her to me, hoping that my body will help shield her when the bomb goes off. For whatever reason, the follower hesitates before killing herself - it is enough time for me to drag Emily through a doorway into another room that undoubtedly saves our lives. The hall explodes and the ensuing fire spreads quickly. Soon, other compound buildings explode as the flames ignite the natural gas tanks that power them. I am lost and disoriented by the smoke, fire, and explosions. The building is collapsing around us - no matter where I lead us, we can’t get free. Emily is becoming heavier against my side. Something flickers in my mind - a brief thought of you, my dear - and then _‘you’re losing her’_. I know with absolute certainty that if Emily dies, I might as well die too. Not even the knowledge of you can stop that.

I find a window and push us through it. It’s enough of a fall to hurt us both, but I get up and drag Emily with me until I trip over something and we both land in a heap amongst running followers, FBI, SWAT, fire responders, and paramedics. We are forgotten in the chaos of explosions and panic. I’m on my back with Emily on top of me. We’re both coughing and trying to blink the smoke from our eyes, and we’re holding onto each other like we’re animals with claws. I call out her name when I can manage it and she raises her head, glass shards in her hair twinkling in the light from the destruction we’ve just survived. Then the building we’ve escaped explodes behind us. I pull her to me instinctively and then her face is above mine - I can finally see her clearly. Her eyes are white-rimmed in terror - I’ve never seen her so afraid. It occurs to me that she’s just watched me murder someone and that it can’t be excused by situational factors. She stares at me. I stare at her. 

I wait.

“Why?” she whispers eventually, and I do not have an answer I can give to her.

Some people are more important than others. I’ve said this before and it’s still true. Emily is important - more important than the hostages, and my job, more important than my life. I don’t understand it, I only _feel_ it, and that is the problem with people, isn’t it? So long as we single some out of the masses, the lines that separate us will continue to exist. I am seeing the fundamental human dilemma from the inside now, and it is both horrifying and a mind-altering breakthrough. This is the most confusing mission I’ve ever undertaken.

I don’t tell her any of this. How can I? Instead, my hand drifts to her face and I skim my fingertips along the damage the cult leader has done. She winces a little but doesn’t move. Her stare intensifies as I get lost in it, tracing her bone structure, marveling at how she still seems in tact. I don’t realize it right away but I am crying. Maybe I think it is blood running down my face. A finger drifts down to her mouth and her lips fall open a little when it does. Her breath is erratic when it breezes against my tears. I can feel her pulse throbbing faintly under my finger along her swollen lip. It is split and bleeding. I gently drag it through the mess and then pull it back to look at it. A sob hiccups out of my chest then and Emily shudders on top of me. I look up at her and now she is crying too. I move the bloody finger to my lips as I stare - I want to preserve this tiny part of her inside me in case I lose her again - but her hand reaches out and stops me.

“Are you two okay?”

It’s Aaron standing over us silhouetted by the fire behind him. I can’t see his face but his voice sounds broken. I blink scrubbing the wetness from my face, and find that I can’t say anything so I just nod instead.

“Fuck,” he answers and then unexpectedly drops to his knees in the dust beside us. “What a goddamned mess.” I feel his hand land on my calf and just rest there as if he can keep me from harm by holding me to the earth.

Then Emily suddenly moves and throws herself around Aaron so quickly that he makes an ‘oh!’ sound as he scrambles to hold her. I couldn’t be more stunned, and there’s a part of me that’s upset she chose him over me. She shifts closer in his arms and then we both hear her quiet crying. Aaron’s hands tighten on her.

“Emily, are you all right?” He’s now just as worried for her as he is for me.

“It’s such a mess, Aaron…” she snuffles and refuses to say more.

The night continues to erupt around us for hours, but this is the moment when everything changes.

She comes to me later. It might have been a day or more - I lose a definite sense of things after the compound for a while - but it is night again when she knocks on my hotel door. She looks worse than before - the bruises and swelling have really taken hold, and she is walking gingerly as if her ribs are bothering her. It feels as if I haven’t seen her in decades and there’s this joyous ache in me that she’s here again. I smile even though it aggravates my own bruises, and maybe it’s one of my crazed smiles because she looks shocked, and then happy, and then she lets out a wet bark of laughter that is far more expressive than anything she could say to me. She shuffles closer and I am preparing for one of her hugs. Whatever she saw in me as I killed a man in front of her, she appears willing to live with it and I am relieved. I sigh and relax a little, but she doesn’t hug me. She cups my jaw in her hand and kisses me instead.

It lasts a moment and then ends but it isn’t a friendly kiss at all. Her hand remains on my jaw as we watch each other carefully. The ache in my body is celebrating a victory I didn’t know I’d been questing for. It has all happened so quietly: I have fallen in love for the second time. I lean in and take her mouth again as gently as I can. The cut on her lip splits anyway and I suck in the taste of that part of her I wanted to keep. Something coppery and alive and important. She slips into my mouth, curls closer, makes it last. And then she pulls away with a sigh, stroking the side of my face and stepping back.

“Okay then. Now we know where we stand.”

It doesn’t seem possible to me that she has fallen as well. How does this keep happening to me? And now I realize that I will end up hurting her as well. I take a step towards her, not knowing what I’m going to do but she stops me with a hand on my chest. She shakes her head at me.

“It’s one thing to know. But I’m not doing anything about it.”

“Why?” I feel like I’ve gained her and lost her in the same breath.

“Because of Aaron.”

She is so much stronger than I am. She tells me she loves me and then walks out of my room. She can care for me and not have me, and she does that _for_ me and for a man who hasn’t always thought highly of her. I realize that I have never loved as unselfishly as that and this only deepens what I feel for her. In an instant, she understands me, forgives me, and won’t let me complicate an already untenable situation even further Sometimes Emily is a lot smarter than me.

We do not sleep together but we get closer - as close as I ever get to anyone save Aaron. We do not bother denying that we are in love. I do not pretend that I am not also in love with Aaron. She does not pretend like this matters at all.

I’m not sure if Aaron knows about any of this before she dies. If he does, he keeps it to himself. He’s good at keeping things to himself. In the period after Foyet’s murder when I spend too much time and energy being disappointed in him, Emily gets indignant on Aaron’s behalf. She yells at me, ranting that I am condemning the man I love for something I have done myself: I killed a man _for her._ In Emily’s eyes there is no difference. She suggests, truthfully and unkindly, that I am pissed off Aaron did it for his dead wife and not me. My jealousy of Haley is pointless especially in light of the fact I am in love with two people at the same time. How is that so different from Aaron? Emily gets right in my face about my hypocrisy and demands that I _be better._ She makes me want to stop judging humanity and instead experience it more honestly. I see now that giving in, sinking under the swell of it is the only way to gain any insight. I feel like a child painfully coming of age through mistakes and regrets. It is unpleasant to be sure, but isn’t that how all humans negotiate life? How can I properly investigate and report on my time here if I remain detached from that? I thought I was doing this correctly, but all it took was a few decades and a human woman to demonstrate that I’m just as clueless as everyone else.

This bewildering ouroboros continues to unknit my universal understanding until May 2011 when Emily dies. A man from a past case whose only importance is the fact that he manages to kill Emily Prentiss, takes his petty revenge and steals her away. I never even see her - she dies in someone else’s arms - and no one will let me say goodbye to her. One day we’re watching Pinky and The Brain together - arguing over which rat is better - and the next she is simply _gone._ Her murderer escapes and I find myself drowning in the enormity of the void she leaves behind.

I am told that I collapse at the hospital when her death is confirmed. I have no memory of this. I also do not attend her funeral. Perhaps this was a conscious choice, but I doubt it. Similarly, I have no memory of Aaron during this time. It is a certainty that he is worried for me. Even if he didn’t love me, his guilt would drive him to me. We are still recovering from the separation caused by Foyet’s death - a separation ended by Emily’s bullheaded insistence on reality - but somehow I can’t _see_ him in any of the foggy recollections of this time. 

I want to end. Not leave, my love. Strangely I have no desire to leave as I have in the past. But I want to die. I feel pointless and beaten, and somehow even the thought of you, dear, isn’t enough to rouse me this time. It is ten years since I joined the FBI resolved to help humanity. It is eleven years since Maeve killed herself. It is twenty years since I saw John Douglas speak. It is thirty-nine years since Sam failed to meet me at the firepit. It is forty-nine years since Blanche took me to her trailer in Roswell. It is fifty-two years since I landed naked on a forgotten highway in the desert. I am tired. I want it all to go away, my love. I am never going to find you. I will never understand what any of this is for. I am grieving for the third time and it is devouring me. I love her… I love her so… this messy, wet, fragile alien who is so different from me, so representative of everything I love about her kind…

I am slapped hard across the face and brought careening back into splintering reality with a loud yelp. It seems like my cheek is going to explode. I can almost feel the handprint left on my face. I blink around, disoriented. I am in my apartment lying on my couch in a dirty bathrobe. The smell of musty neglect is overpowering. Aaron is standing over me, ashen and haggard.

“You hit me!”

He nods. “Yelling wasn’t working. Neither was begging. You’ve been lying here for weeks without a word. I had to do something.”

“So you _hit_ me.”

“You missed her funeral.”

“So what,” I choke back. “She wasn’t there.” The last time I saw her was on this couch watching cartoons with me. Aaron looks as if I’ve just changed forms on him, like I’ve turned from a solid into vapor.

“Forgive her,” he whispers and then drops to his knees in front of the couch. He clasps my jaw, just below where he’s hit me. His eyes are glassy and desperate. I am so confused that I temporarily feel only that to the exclusion of everything else. It is blissful.

“For what? Dying?” How do I do that? He doesn’t have an answer for me. He just pulls me into his shoulder and repeats, ‘Forgive her’ like that’s everything I need. I should have trusted him - he’s my best friend after all. It turns out that’s all I really needed to know.


	7. Chapter 7

It is March 2012 and Emily walks into the conference room on the sixth floor of the Behavioral Analysis building in Quantico. I have never experienced resurrection before. One look at Aaron tells me that he was in on it from the start and I wonder how close those two actually are. Despite the lying and betrayal of my trust, I am not angry with him at all. It comes as a shock to him as well, let me tell you. I can’t explain why this is except perhaps because I know him so well as to realize that he’ll beat himself up over these failings far more effectively than I will. Maybe I just decide to leave him to it. It doesn’t change how I feel about him, and it also doesn’t change the fact that I can’t talk him out of something like this once he gets the stupid idea in his head.

My anger towards Emily, on the other hand, is incendiary. She explains why she did it (to protect us from the man who tried to kill her) and though it should be noble, it just strikes me as the stupidest solution to that particular scenario. I tell her so. Repeatedly. It doesn’t occur to me until much later that now she, Aaron, and I have all committed the same sin: we have brutally killed in the name of those we love. I lash out and won’t let her near me. My body aches with the same intensity as when she died and I don’t know how to ease it. I can’t keep still, I can’t find peace, and I have no idea what happens now.

“You’re in love with her.”

I look up into Aaron’s shocked expression one evening in the bullpen. I guess I’ll never know exactly when he figured it out, but I suspect it was in this moment. I just grumble at him because love or no, I can’t see past my anger.

“You need to go to her,” he says quietly and I can’t believe my ears.

“Why?” I turn on him savagely and I don’t care that he doesn’t deserve it. He just closes off and goes into supervisor mode on me.

“Go to her. Figure it out.”

Then I’m banging on her condo door just to prove that Aaron doesn’t know what he’s talking about. She lets me in and doesn’t look surprised at all. She allows me to yell at her; she withstands the abuse and accusations calmly, waiting for me to tire myself out. It takes so long that she slouches against the wall and starts to look a little bored. This just gives me a second wind.

“Doesn’t this mean anything to you?” I bellow.

“Are you done?”

I stride up and grab her too hard. I am possessed with rage and frustration and I use it to knock her into the wall.

“Justify yourself! Defend what you’ve done to my heart, Emily!”

Of course, she already has but I can’t accept it. She just leans up into my rage with a softness that doesn’t make any sense in this situation.

“I did it because I love you and I couldn’t let an idiot from my past end you any more than you could let it happen to me. Now we’ve both had our shameful, fiery-compound moment, haven’t we?”

And just like that my rage abandons me.

“I left you in good hands. I knew that if I failed to put the bastard down, you’d still be all right. You’d still have Aaron. By the way, this whole operation really did a number on him. Don’t be angry with him for being a part of it - he tried to talk me out of it. He talked until he was blue in the face. And I’m sure that the lion’s share of his objections was how it would impact you. He loves you so much. You were always right about that…”

“What about _you_ , Emily? Don’t you see that this isn’t a zero-sum situation?”

“Well… I came back because of love…”

She is hesitant and I just can’t stand it anymore. I know we have an agreement _not to_ , but she was dead and now she’s not and I’d rather live with the experience of confessing my frailty to Aaron than letting her slip from me again. I kiss her and kiss her and kiss her until I can’t breathe; once again I choose her over survival. The ache in me becomes glorious instead of painful when we touch. I tell myself that I am completely at the mercy of the instinct systems within the body I inhabit but that isn’t true. Love is intangible - it isn’t a physical thing. My mind is still mine - foreign and unfamiliar with these drives - and yet it cannot detach from them. My mind decides to love Emily, and then it directs my body to follow, not the other way around. I am alien and it still happens. 

It all finally comes together in her hallway in an uncoordinated, tangled, urgent way and I don’t care because it is perfect in its imperfection. I gasp against her afterwards, trousers threatening to trip me as they bunch around my calves and her half-shed blouse knotted in my hands pushing us both into the wall for support. I whisper that I love her into her hair, and for the first time in nearly a year, I can see you again, my dear. You have returned to me and it is the same joy as her return. I suddenly feel that maybe I can go on, but only if I take some ownership over my possible path.

“I’m going to tell Aaron.”

“No-” She grabs my shirt and tries to shake sense into me.

“I’m going to tell him. I’m going to explain that I love you both. And then I’m going to leave it up to you two.”

She blinks. “What?”

“Either we can all live with this, or we can’t. I won’t choose one of you over the other. I don’t want that. But it’s not for me to decide. You and Aaron have to have an honest discussion on this - just about what you two want independent of me. If you two want me, I’ll stay. If not, I’ll go.”

“That’s crazy.”

“Why?”

“Because people don’t do this!”

“Why?”

She doesn’t have an answer for me, and clearly doesn’t come up with one before she meets with Aaron. I’ll never know how that conversation went and I think it’s best if you don’t ask them about it, my love. Let that part of the story live only in their minds. The important parts are the two messages I receive afterwards. Emily leaves me a voicemail simply stating that no matter how it all turns out, she and Aaron have agreed to go out for chicken wings afterwards. Aaron just texts me later and it is a single word: _Okay._

Perhaps this is all very strange to you, my dear, or perhaps it isn’t. I feel myself wanting to justify it more to you, and then I remember that this is the only way you’ve known us. I guess the only thing left to say is that none of us knew the implications of what we were doing. I like to think that if we had, we still wouldn’t have done it any differently. But who knows? The math alone suggests that in another universe we _did_ resolve it differently, and that thought makes me very grateful to be in this one instead.


	8. Chapter 8

Now we skip ahead to autumn 2016 and the world feels like it’s taking a turn for the worse. Terrorism is an almost constant presence in our lives. Syria, Turkey, Libya, Egypt, Afghanistan, Iraq, Ukraine, and parts of West Africa tear themselves apart with varying degrees of devastation through civil wars. An unprecedented exodus of refugees trying to escape these wars floods Western Europe. A new isolationist ideology comes into favor and encourages the resurgence of racism, sexism, homophobia, faith-based prejudice, and nationalistic violence. North Korea mindlessly pursues an aggressive nuclear weapons program without regard to the lessons learned in the Cold War. People shoot down passenger planes. People bomb their own people in hopes of eliminating the enemies within their borders. People shoot other people because they are different, or they are angry, or because they are simply having a bad day. We relinquish some of our rights and a lot more of our humanity in the name of safety that is no longer guaranteed. Technology makes us more vulnerable due to our interconnectedness, and yet we are more alone than ever. America elects a President who brings out the worst in others. It is almost Orwellian and might be darkly humorous if we had anywhere else to go in order to escape it all.

But still, life goes on. I’m a little more sanguine about it now than when I arrived, but half a century will mellow anyone a little. However, this will all change very quickly.

This is where you enter the story, my love. Finally.

I am in bed with your mother. Now, up to this point I’ve been both honest and vague about my physical interludes and there are reasons for that. I’ve been honest about it because these moments have been important to how we get _here_ , and also I do not want you to get the wrong idea about me. I’ve made mistakes. I have no desire for you to think of me in some idealized way. I guarantee that no one gets this right no matter how careful they are. I’ve also been vague about these moments because I have no idea how old you’ll be when you read this. I’m sure your father will try to keep it from you until you hit puberty at least. I’m hoping that your mother will have more sense and allow you a glimpse of the pitfalls of intimacy _before_ your hormones assail you. Regardless, you need to understand that your parents have sex. They do it frequently and they do it because it feels good and when you love this way it becomes a bond that makes you incredibly strong. So don’t wrinkle your nose or wince at this - it’s natural. Get over it. Do yourself a favor and see your parents as _people_ , not saints. Do it sooner rather than later. That’s probably the sum total of my sexual advice to you. This is the least comfortable passage that I’ve written thus far and I’m sure you’ll feel the same way when reading it. I apologize but it is necessary.

I am in bed with your mother and we are doing our best to block out the vicissitudes of reality for the evening. We are doing a very good job at it. Your father is there too; we wouldn’t have it any other way. It took us a long time to get comfortable with this. I’m not going to lie - we all had our doubts about it at one point or another. Your father and mother are daring people, but it took a lot daring, a lot of love, to make this leap. There was a moment when it all could’ve fallen apart. Presumably in some universe somewhere it did. But then I stumble upon them at a team BBQ one warm summer evening, his arm around her shoulders pulling her close as they smile at each other. They’ve been friends for years now. The time is long since past when they were wary of one another’s intentions. They’ve been through too much; they’ve been there for each other too many times for anything to exist between them other than trust. It is his smile that catches my attention: he’s smiled at me that way. I know the power of it. Then he gently, almost shyly, kisses her under the paper lanterns with a forgotten beer perspiring in his hand. Her palm lays flat along his ridiculous Hawaiian shirt that Garcia makes him wear and she just sort of _melts_ a little. And I am overjoyed, my dear. It is the most unselfish sensation I’ve ever felt. It is the beginning. It is finally about them. They are connected in a way that is separate from me. It is a memory that I hold close because it is the initiation of equality in our association. I can worry less about them when I have to leave - they will have each other. It will be fine.

Still your father is hesitant about being with her. It is long after that summer BBQ when he finally submits and makes love to her for the first time. And afterwards he keeps apologizing until both your mother and I threaten to neuter him if he doesn’t admit that he enjoyed it. But like any familiar pairing, we fall into habits that we enjoy and repeat. Tonight is no exception. Your father is with me, and I am with your mother, and we work together as one. Aaron comes first; it’s something to do with the way Emily moans when she’s close - it just undoes him somehow. But I don’t last much longer because I’m the middle segment and that’s too much sensory overload to withstand. Emily follows just a second behind as I struggle to buttress Aaron’s dead weight against my back as well as my own exhaustion and avoid crushing her. _This_ has always done something to her even though she laughs it off more often than not. We all flop down in a tangled, sated lump as Emily chuckles at how rubbery we’ve all become. I kiss her like it’s going out of style, and Aaron does the same. When the last of our energy leaves us, we mumble our love and drift off into contented sleep all thread through and around one another. It is my favorite thing.

Somewhere in the night, one spermatozoon out of millions successfully breaches an ovum. When the first cell division occurs, you begin, my love.

It never strikes to me that in order to find you, you must first be created. And all of those years where procreation never interested me… well, when Emily sits Aaron and me down a month later, I am suddenly very interested. And terrified. Emily and Aaron are sporadically together, but not around her conception date. We all come to the conclusion pretty quickly that you are mine. This poses a problem for no one but me. Aaron is over the moon; he’s always wanted children and tried in vain with Haley for years. Emily seems genuinely surprised that it’s happened but begins smiling during the conversation and can’t seem to stop. 

I am devastated. 

You see, my love, I still don’t realize that it’s _you_. All I know is that I have fathered a child that I’m going to have to abandon at some point. I have been at the FBI for fifteen years now and haven’t aged a day. Aaron’s hair is greying, Emily is beginning to worry about wrinkles… The jokes made about my youthful looks are becoming a lot less humorous and a lot more pointed. I have already been steeling myself to the reality that I have to leave them soon. But leaving a child behind as well was never part of the plan. And Emily is looking at me with a distant sort of anticipation, like she’s picturing me as I teach you about insects, or helping you build a treehouse, or at your high school graduation.

I proceed to panic, skipping right past the foreign burst of joy at my center when Emily tells me the news. For an instant it’s like I’ve swallowed stars and I can’t breathe around all of the excited pinging that happens when I try to imagine what half of her and me combined will look like. I start hyperventilating and everyone goes into crisis mode like we’re at Defcon 2. Emily produces a paper bag from somewhere. Aaron uses that deep tone he has that could calm a horde of murderous barbarians. They both hunch down in front of me as I sit on the couch and try desperately for an organized thought, and wait.

“I can’t do this,” I whisper, and they immediately fill the air with assurances that _I can_ , that they’ll help me, that it’s not as hard as I think it is…

“No. You don’t understand. It’s not that I don’t _want_ to do it. It’s that I _won’t be allowed to._ ”

And that stops them cold because they’re not sure what neurotic snakes are twisting up my brain at that exact moment. I am prone to neurotic snakes, figuratively speaking of course.

We all just stare at each other in heavy silence for a minute. They are being very generous with me, and I am racing through all the possible options this situation has brought into existence. There are surprisingly few of them, and they are all quickly collapsing into a single, realistic choice.

Finally, Aaron decides I need some prompting. “You’re going to have to make a little more sense than that.”

There has never been any dictate that I hide my origin. Perhaps that decision is just obvious to everyone who does what I do. In some places it probably wouldn’t make any impact at all to announce yourself as alien; there are many corners of the universe where the singularity of life has been known to be a myth forever. But this is Earth where members of your own species are condemned for _thinking_ differently. I am wholly different. Although it doesn’t bother me that Aaron and Emily are not of my kind - I love them regardless - I wonder if their love is equally generous. Especially Emily, who will have to face the unfathomable truth that she is carrying a half-alien child.

Forgive me for yet another segue, my love, but this is important and I don’t think it can wait. I want you to know that you are _entirely human._ When I say that Emily is carrying a half-alien baby, I am referring to her perception of your make-up, not your actual genetic structure. When I assume a form, I take on all of its characteristics. While there are some anomalies, such as the no-aging thing and the preservation of my mental acuity, I am in all other respects a perfect mimic of whatever organism I become. I am genderless, but upon arriving here I chose to become male. Therefore I have sperm, and evidently they function adequately. I do not have superpowers. You will not mutate or suddenly develop wings or be able to shoot lasers from your eyes (although my extensive research into the comic book phenomenon tells me that I should apologize to you for this lack of excitement, because all of those things seem sort of awesome). My contribution to your DNA is 100% human and no medical investigation of any kind will show evidence to the contrary. But nevertheless you will have uniquenesses that are mine alone - perhaps my human smile or maybe something less literal like my sense of curiosity. You will absolutely have a part of me, just in an altered way that is difficult to describe.

Anyway, to get back to where I’ve left us all, I make my choice, and even though it is probably the biggest, most dangerous one I’ve made in my time here, it doesn’t feel as if it takes me long to decide upon it.

“I’m an alien.”

No one reacts at all. I try again.

“An extra-terrestrial. I was born elsewhere. As in _other planet_. I came here in 1959 and assumed this body but I haven’t aged or changed since then.”

There’s another moment of painful silence and then Emily erupts, standing quickly as her face reddens dangerously.

“You know what? That… that’s the cruelest excuse you could come up with for not wanting this child. As if either one of us would believe that! After absolutely _everything_ we’ve been through… why would you choose to hurt us now? Like this?”

“It’s not an excuse.” I stand quickly as well, and then Aaron is between her and me, and for the first time in our association it is the two of them aligned against me. “And I’m not telling you this because I want to hurt you or because I don’t want the baby. I… I _do_ want it… but there are complications.”

Then I launch into my fifty-year story as quickly and simply as I can. It takes tremendous effort because I’m terrified the whole time and my pulse is trying the choke the life from my chest every step of the way. And then there’s the perception of time thing: my chronology gets confusing in places, and the panic I feel at losing them only makes that worse. It is this terrible, smothering constriction because they are everything to me; they are the distillation of this world, and every single beautiful insight I’ve gained along the way. They have made me greater than my sum total before coming to this place. There is no way to accurately quantify what they have done to my being. By the end I’m gasping and shaking, and from the look on their faces I have utterly failed to convince them. I start to wonder what they’ll do next. Will they report me to someone? Will they have me locked up? Or will they just toss me out and tell me to never darken their doorway again?

Emily is making hysterically angry noises. Aaron just glares at me and folds his arms across his chest. Then he does something unexpected that nonetheless I should’ve expected from him. He gives me a chance.

“Can you prove any of this?” he growls. 

And suddenly I realize _I can._

I run from the living room, and then the house, like it’s on fire. I’m stumbling through the backyard to the old garage we use for storage. I have tons of boxes in there that I haven’t looked in for decades: thesis notes, teaching outlines, paperwork from JPL… But I’m scrambling for a lock box. In it are the things I should’ve let go of over the years, but just couldn’t. It’s sort of a weatherproof, secure hiding place for my memories. I don’t know why I keep them because I cannot take the box when I leave, and I only open it to seal away more memories inside. It’s never made much sense to me.

I fumble with the combination and then my entire human life breathes fresh air again. I stop for a moment and hesitate because seeing all of these things jumbled together without order brings it all back as if it’s happening again _right now_. I’ve been adapting to linear time perception for so long that I’m momentarily overwhelmed by how time actually is. I feel like maybe I’ll be sick, but then your face coalesces in my mind, little one, and I pull it together. Perhaps this is a bad idea, but I’m going to finish what I’ve started.

I turn and find Aaron and Emily have followed me to the garage. They are both wary but no longer seem angry. That’s a start I guess. I shuffle forward with the open box held out like an offering. They blink at me and then blink at the contents of the box. There is a photo of Maeve and I on top at a psych department Christmas party. We are wrapped around each other and smiling like we’re hopelessly in love. In the background there is a banner that says ‘Merry Christmas 1994!’.

“That’s Maeve.” I hold the picture out to them and Aaron takes it from me and stares. “We met a few months before that was taken.”

I lift out another photograph. This one is from JPL. It’s probably around 1985. I’m posing with others from the lab. My suit is boxy and my tie is thin, and I am wearing an absurd amount of hair gel. The computers on the desks behind us are clunky, beige boxes networked by huge cables sitting next to dot matrix printers. Half way out of the frame it looks like someone is playing Galaga on one of them. 

“This is JPL,” I say as I hand it over. “Shuttle systems design for NASA. That was a fun time.”

My dog tags are in the corner of the lock box. I lift them out and hand them over without looking up and without explanation. I hear Emily gasp and then mutter ‘holy shit’. There’s a photo as well. It’s a black and white shot of my entire unit. There are palm fronds in the background and the whole thing seems over exposed but that’s because of the sunlight. I can almost feel the oppressive humidity when I hold it. The shot is small and there are lots of faces but you can still make me out. I look miserable. On the back the army has helpfully stamped it with time, date, unit number, and general location as if they knew I’d need it someday.

“This is 1971,” I say quietly as if I’ll disturb the memory. “I’d been in-country for four months when this was taken.”

Aaron takes the photo with shaking hands. Then he flips it to see the stamp and swallows audibly. I pull out another photo. This one is black and white as well but has turned sepia with age. There are white creases marring the image and a hole in the white border where it was once tacked up somewhere. There’s a fighter plane and a grinning test pilot with a square buzz cut that was popular in the 50s. The land blurs behind him in an endless flat vista of brown-greys. A few of us are standing around him, all grinning the way he is. I am in my favorite suit: the high-waisted cream pants with the checkered jacket. I’m wearing a short, fat tie that’s flipping in the desert wind and my hands are on my hips like I’m Superman. I smile at how young I seem, but I am exactly the same age in every photo.

“This was the first successful super sonic flight test I worked on at White Sands. It was a beautiful day. The sky was so clear…”

Emily takes the photo but she looks like she’s not seeing it. “When… when was this?”

“1959.”

There are more in the box and I just hand it over to them. Aaron pokes through them but I don’t think he’s seeing any of them either.

“You’re the same in every one,” he murmurs eventually and Emily stifles a noise that might be a sob.

“That’s because I don’t age. Well… I do, but the body I’m in doesn’t.”

“And here I always thought you just had secret supermodel genes or something.” Emily tries to sound glib but I can see the tears leaving tracks down her cheeks. I reach out to brush them away and she flinches. I freeze and feel horrified. Nothing has changed for me, but everything has changed for them.

“Why are you here?” Aaron growls.

“To observe life.”

“For what purpose?”

I’m starting to see the fear creep into them and it bottoms me out, little one. I don’t want them to retreat into the survival instincts that limit their understanding. But they are human and instincts are what they fall back on when all else fails. What did I expect would happen?

“I, uh… there’s a kind of… galactic encyclopedia. I get assigned to places and make reports about them. The life forms, the atomic make-up of them, climatic patterns, orbits, moons etc. Whatever the editors want, really. I’m a scientist - I observe things. Sometimes I get more specific requests…” I want to tell them about you, my love, but I’m frightened about how my mission will sound to them. It already sounds crazy to me.

“Don’t you think that _becoming_ what you’re supposed to observe is sorta a dangerous move?” Emily snaps and I step back like she’s hit me.

“Experiential data is the most enlightening.”

“Well, I’m glad we were fucking ‘enlightening’ at least.”

“Emily,” Aaron murmurs as he moves closer to her. “He can’t help who he is…”

And this statement more than anything else destroys me. Aaron has just drawn a line between us, no longer interested in my ‘otherness’ or seeing all of the ways that we are exactly the same. The trust we had, the connection we made has been suddenly voided because I am not of his kind. Human rage floods me in an instant and for once I am not ashamed of it. It is not something I ever knew before I came here, much like love, but I am thankful that I can _feel_ it. I didn’t close myself off to it because it was foreign to me. I didn’t stop to think about whether I should love them or not because they weren’t like me…

“And who am I, exactly?” I yell. It snaps them both around like they no longer believe me capable of emotion. Well, I’ll show them…

“I came here having no idea what it would be like to be human, but that didn’t stop me from being curious. My experiences have been frightening, bewildering, horrifying, joyous, painful, shameful, elucidating… And not one of these emotions was familiar to me before I experienced it. But did that foreignness keep me from trying to understand it all? Did it prevent me from relating to this world and its inhabitants? Was it a barrier to falling in love with people so completely different from me? Not at all. Because I _do_ love you both, and your contentious species, and I am as helpless against this feeling as you are. It doesn’t matter that I wasn’t born here or that these impulses aren’t native to me. Do you not see that the reason why you all feel so isolated is that you are determined to ignore how similar everything is? You see a child and a flower and a virus and dark matter, and you think each of those things is separate from the rest. But it isn’t. I am not separate from you unless you _decide_ that’s how things should be. Maybe I don’t have arms and legs, maybe I’m as small as an atom, maybe I don’t even have a language to speak to you, but I _feel_ what you _feel._ I have walked this world with you. I have defended life here with no thought for how it would benefit me. I am connected to you across any boundaries you can erect between us.”

I take a breath - I need it. And then I step forward and dare them to look away. “Does that really mean absolutely fucking _nothing_ to you now?”

They are both just… blank. But I know better. Neither one of them has been devoid of intellect for a moment in the time I’ve known them. Part of me, a very human part, is hoping that I cracked their shells, that I can slide in and start a chain reaction in my favor. If I am to leave this place, I want it to be on my terms, not because everything here that I value has rejected me.

Emily initiates it. I should’ve guessed - my beautiful, brave Emily… She steps around Aaron and then stops, wiping the wetness from her face. Then she looks me in the eye, the way she does when she’s applying herself to a mystery, and takes a determined step forward.

“So. Uh… so. W-what do you look like? Really, I mean.”

She breaks my heart, little one, she really does. I smile so widely and suddenly that it hurts my face. I want to hold her and thank her for this. I’ve always trusted her and now I realize that’s she’s doing her best to return the favor. I have to be patient. We’ll get there.

“It’s, well… it’s very different from this.” I gesture to the length of me.

“Can we… can we see it?” Aaron steps up behind her.

“You will. Someday. I promise.”

Emily nods and then gets quiet and serious. She’s thinking something over very deliberately but when she finally spits it out I know that we’ll be okay.

“So, you can choose to look like any human you want, any combination of infinite variables, and _this_ is what you went with?”

I look myself up and down, and then do a quick spin around in the garage. “What’s wrong with it? I really like this body…”

“You’re sorta skinny,” she wrinkles her nose and tries to suppress a smile.

“And those fingers,” Aaron adds, but he’s not hiding his smirk at all. “We should’ve known you were an alien from those fingers.”

“You could’ve been anyone.”

I become brave, like her, and step forward. “So could you,” I tell her and then draw her hair away from her cheek. She doesn’t flinch this time. “It doesn’t change a thing. It’s just a shell, Emily.”

A hand lands on my bicep, warm and solid, and when I look at Aaron, the same feeling is radiating from every part of him. “So you’d love us even if we had tentacles? Or were spiders? Or were protoplasm?”

“I think we’d have to draw the line at single-celled organisms. There’s probably not a lot of intellectual stimulation there. But tentacles might have been fun.”

He laughs in that way he only does for us - his family - and my chest feels like it’ll crack. Now they see me. _Me._ And I will never be completely alone again.

“I have so many questions,” he says almost shyly.

“I will try to answer them, I swear.”


	9. Chapter 9

We don’t solve the dilemma of your impending existence that day, my love. As you can imagine, there are a lot of necessary talks that have to be addressed _before_ we decide how we are going to raise a half-alien baby in a polyamorous relationship in which one being is of a different species and has the troubling quality of conspicuous youth. 

I eventually tell them that I was planning on leaving them before I found out about the baby, and that goes over as disastrously as you can imagine. Although I explain that I’m not thinking about it now - not after I’ve revealed my nature to them - it _will_ happen one day. I cannot remain twenty-five in the same place, around the same people indefinitely. They understand it, but they cannot accept it. Especially Emily, who, in her defense, is feeling unusually vulnerable because of her condition.

“There _has_ to be a way around this!”

“There isn’t. It’s how this process works. Honestly, it’s never been an issue until now.”

“But we need you. You have to stay! We’re gonna be a goddamned family…”

Perception is my most immediate problem: not theirs, but everyone else’s. Aaron is the one who suggests I retire from the Bureau. In the eyes of my investigator colleagues I should be forty by now. A lot of pressure about me is relieved if I move on to something else and away from their critical focus. And Aaron correctly points out that I have experience in other areas and have never had much of a problem finding work. So, 2016 is my final year as an FBI agent. It was good work - meaningful - and I believe that I helped people along the way, as I initially intended. But I do not miss it. I take the best parts of that period of my life with me; I come home to them every night. 

I become a teacher once more, this time at Georgetown University in the psychology department. Everyone is delighted to have me, my enduring ‘genius’ lie once again paying dividends, and no one asks too many questions. The team members try to maintain a presence in my post-Bureau life but eventually professional distance makes them drift away. The only one who refuses to give into it is Garcia and I have no idea what she makes of either my living arrangements with Aaron and Emily, or my strange homeostasis. 

As we move closer to your arrival, little one, we all try to adjust to the new reality of the life we’ve built. Emily settles into the idea of becoming a mother. It helps when I reassure her that you will not be born with horns or a tail or a lizard face. Aaron gets quiet and thoughtful, more so than usual, but he is also the first one to reach out for me again. Naturally, when you announce that you are a different species, your lovers get a little circumspect. But Aaron needs this closeness now for whatever reason that he keeps to himself, and I am too relieved to risk rocking the boat about it. I need it too, after all. They have no idea how much - it’s like the air in my lungs.

I know that this story has been filled with dramatic moments, my love, but I don’t want you to think that my time here is wall-to-wall misery. That’s far from the truth. It’s just that many of the important moments are… complex. Even during this period before your birth, when our lives change so radically, we have wonderful times together. Like when we all take a road trip through the Southwest simply because none of us has ever done it before. We even go to Roswell. I show them the stretch of highway where I first appeared. Aaron says that it’s a miracle I wasn’t shot on sight. He’s probably right. I’ve honestly wandered through so many precarious situations here on Earth out of sheer ignorance to the danger surrounding me. It’s probably best that I can’t see down my own path too clearly, and I think it’s downright lifesaving that humans can’t glimpse their futures. No one would ever leave their homes again if they could.

We go camping in the desert so I can see the stars away from the light pollution of the big cities. I don’t sleep at all that night, just staring up into the twinkling blackness while telling them both a long, rambling explanation of what it is like for me out there. My space-traveling, research job suddenly seems like a tremendous risk, and I have to wonder if it is _your_ impending arrival that has made me newly cautious. Emily lies with her head in my lap, blanket securely wrapped around her growing belly, and Aaron sits next to me looking up, watching. They both have no idea about the things I’ve seen and done, but I keep thinking there has to be a way to share it with them. I tell them the most beautiful thing I can think of and that is the nature of starlight. 

The universe is mind-bogglingly big and filled with stars. The light from those stars travels from them and its path continues undiminished until something impedes it. Because space has a lot of, well… spaces between things, starlight can travel a very long way before it is blocked from view. There may even be some stars whose light can be seen on the far side of the universe. The thing is, stars die like everything else. The light from some stars can take millions or billions of years to reach someone’s perception, and when it does, most of those stars will be long dead. But their light still exists, moving through space, doing only what it is meant to do, but also reminding us of an entity that has ceased to be. Perhaps a star at the beginning of everything has emitted light that is still traveling now. It’s possible. Perhaps that light will remain until it reaches the other end of an infinite universe, essentially being an immortal product of something mortal. I tell them that this is the way I see them, the way I see you, little one. What we have created has altered us and sent an energy signature out into the universe. It just isn’t as obvious as light. This remarkable occurrence - this unlikely connection between distant points - may have created an energy that could travel to the edge of everything. It could exist beyond our lives, long after we’re forgotten. Out _there._

Emily snuggles closer, hands around her belly, but says nothing. Aaron’s lips brush the hair at my temple, and I smile.

“You are a dreamer,” he murmurs. I suppose I am.

The next day I take them to the Martian Diner. It’s still there, though slightly more of tourist hangout than I remember. Many of the patrons are UFO enthusiasts. Our waitress, an old woman named Flo who gives me a small panic attack when she shows up at our table in familiar horn-rimmed glasses, brings us pie and coffee. Emily claims it’s the best pie she’s ever eaten and I have to agree that the standards haven’t slipped much in fifty years. Aaron refuses a slice but indulges in a mug of black coffee. He smirks at me over the rim and nods, saying it’s ‘damn fine’. Emily leans against me in our booth and gives me a wicked smile.

“This must be weird for you, huh?”

“Indeed. Just imagine what would happen if I stood up now and announced myself.”

“You’d be a rockstar. You’d be bigger than Bieber.”

I don’t know what a ‘Bieber’ is, and I have a surreal, floaty feeling being here again, but this time with people who understand my secret. I have absolutely no desire for humanity to know me, but _specific_ humans, well… that’s sort of nice.

Aaron excuses himself to the washroom and then almost immediately returns, grabbing my wrist and whispering, “Come with me. Now.” We end up in the corridor leading away from the main restaurant stopping in front of a corkboard labeled ‘The Wall of Weird’. Aaron points at a yellowed piece of newspaper almost covered by other photos, flyers, and clippings. The article title proclaims _‘Naked College Student Appears On Highway Near Roswell’_. Under it is a photo of me, confused and wrapped in a towel as clear as day. I have no idea when it was taken. Someone has helpfully scrawled over the old article in red marker: _‘Victim or Visitor? Help us i.d. him!’_

“Holy crap,” Emily whispers and peers at the article.

“The story doesn’t mention anything noteworthy,” Aaron murmurs.

“Do I really look like that?”

“We should probably go,” Aaron mentions looking around. He’s right: there’s nothing more suspicious than a middle-aged square, a pregnant lady, and a skinny college kid all hunched around a forgotten notice board for paranoid conspiracy theorists staring at a fifty year old newspaper article about _a skinny college kid._ We break apart like a SWAT team on maneuvers. Aaron settles the cheque as I hustle to the parking lot. While we wait for Emily at the car (pregnancy bladder), Aaron begins to laugh. He leans back against it, face towards the sun, and laughs with his whole body.

“Well, that was fun, huh?”

“You think so?”

Then he grabs me and pulls me soundly to his lips. It is rough and familiar, but we haven’t done it in ages. I fall against him and just want to stay there forever, with my hands curled in his shirt and hair. Distantly, I hear someone whistle at us. I remember a time when he wouldn’t have dared to do anything so public, and that was before he knew there were legitimate reasons to be careful about attracting attention. Now he is passionate and fearless and armed with so much more knowledge than previously… He has changed. _I_ have changed him.

“I don’t think I really understood any of this until we came here,” he husks when we come up for air. “And now…”

“And now what?”

“I’m proud of you.”

“Proud? Why?”

“Because you’ve done something unbelievable. Maybe even impossible.”

“Well, if I’ve done it then it is, by definition, possible.”

He rolls his eyes and kisses me again. “You came to an alien place. Possibly hostile.”

“Definitely hostile.”

“You learned us, took us on. Then you took us in - made our struggles yours. You chose to love us. I don’t think that we would’ve done the same thing if our roles were reversed, from a species point of view.”

“But… you love me.”

Aaron’s smile fades as he becomes completely serious. “You know I do. With every fiber of me.”

“Well then, doesn’t that mean there’s hope? I managed to change two human minds. That’s quite something. And we can teach our child the same lessons. And he or she can pass those lessons on as well. And more people might change. And more, and more. It has to start somewhere.”

His eyes grow dark and then he kisses me with an intensity that should never happen in a parking lot. “I’m so damned proud of you,” he growls again when we part. 

“Hey, get a room, you two,” Emily shuffles up with a smirk and a strange expression. “What did I miss?”

“Aaron’s proud of me.” I can’t look away from him. He doesn’t know how much that sentence means to me.

“Of course he is,” she says gently as she leans up to kiss my cheek. Then she turns and walks around to the passenger side of the car. “You’re the best person we’ve ever met.”

Now I can’t look away from her. She puts all of her emphasis on the word ‘person’.

“Do you mean that?” I breathe, staring at her over the roof of the car. Her face lights up in an amused grin, like it’s something she says to me all the time and she doesn’t get why I’m being weird about it.

“Sure I do, Starman. Now let’s get this show on the road before I need to pee again.”

Aaron chuckles next to my ear. “So what do you think? Grand Canyon next? I’ve never seen it. We can be there by tomorrow.” He gets into the car as well and leaves me standing next to it having a fifty-year-old moment of déjà vu. Once I stood in this place and was anonymous. Now I am here again and I look the same, but this time _I am one of them._


	10. Chapter 10

It is August 7th, 2017 at 2:17 am and we are three minutes away from meeting you for the first time. Your mother is struggling; it’s been a difficult labor and she’s been at it for twelve hours. Your father and I are utterly useless here. We stand with her the entire time and are paralyzed with our inability to make any of this easier for her. But Emily is a warrior, and with every scream, every curse I am both worried for her and confident that she’ll see this through.

“Almost there. One last push…” The doctor doesn’t look up, confused by the number of ‘parents’ in the room and wholly terrified that Emily will scream at him again if he tries to get clarification on the matter. Initially when he asks who the father is, she yells at him to _‘MIND YOUR OWN BUSINESS’_ , and Aaron and I share a smile. No one messes with your mom, my love.

Emily funnels all of her remaining energy into a huge push. Aaron is buttressing her back for support and holding a damp towel to her forehead as she leans into it and screams. That sound tortures me every single time she does it during the last twelve hours; something I’ve done to her is causing her terrible pain. I can barely contain my reaction to that knowledge. She’s got a grip on my hand that has dropped me to my knees next to the birthing chair with the way it’s making my bones grind together. I could yell and no one would notice - that’s how loud she is. The whole process seems unnecessarily arduous and painful. I question the reproductive design of the species a lot during this time; it certainly doesn’t encourage one to reproduce often no matter how amazing both the initiation and the end result are. Finally, Emily stops yelling and sags back against Aaron looking as if she’ll never find the energy to move again. The doctor says ‘touchdown’, which I find wholly inappropriate, and then hands you off to a waiting nurse. I yank my hand free of Emily’s and dash after the medical staff as if they’re bank robbers.

“Where are you taking-”

“It’s okay,” the nurse soothes. “We’re just cleaning her up for you. Give us a minute.”

“Her?” We didn’t know until that moment, you see…

An instant later we hear you cry and all of us breathe again as one. 

You are placed in your mother’s arms and we name you. It is a name we have all agreed on beforehand. Though much about you is a question mark, your name was never in doubt. I watch as it falls from both Emily and Aaron’s lips with reverence. I didn’t think that I’d feel the way I do when this happens. I am… humbled. 

Your mother is still leaning against your father for support but they are both staring at you and grinning as if they’ve just learned how. I step outside of our connection for this brief moment to take the scene in just as the observer I’m meant to be. There is such love in them both - for each other and for you. I consider how we’ve all changed in the time we’ve known one another, how this scene would have seemed impossible sixteen years earlier. I see the possibility of something _better_ that lies somewhere beyond this moment - a possibility where mistakes can be forgiven and differences overlooked. I see a child who is both of this world as well as another, and the only thing that matters to her or her parents is the connection of unfettered love. In this instant the only thought in my head as I stare at you all is, _‘Isn’t this how it **should** be?’_

Eventually Emily leans forward with a grunt and hands you to me for the first time. Her eyes are glassy, her face rosy and exhausted.

“Here you go, Starman,” she whispers.

I look down at your little face and… _oh._

“It’s YOU,” I say in awe. 

Your features are still far from what I’ve glimpsed, it is difficult to know for sure, but somehow _I just know._ Now I understand why Emily has always seemed familiar to me. Her features are shadows of yours - or what yours will be one day. The face from my visions is _your_ face - a strange combination of Emily’s and mine that I couldn’t comprehend until this moment. I’ve traveled across galaxies for you. I fell from the stars to understand the meaning of your ghostly appearance in my mind. But none of the time and memories and struggles could have told me that I’d love you the moment we touched. And such a love… The most powerful and devastating version yet. I will never recover.

You are ten minutes old and I have fallen in love with a human for the last time.

I hear someone talking to me and I look up. Aaron and Emily are both staring, worried.

“What? What is it?” I whisper.

“You’re crying,” Aaron says. “Are you okay?”

“You don’t understand,” I grin at them both but it does nothing to alleviate their worry. “She is _my mission_. I’ve been looking for so long, but I didn’t know it would happen this way. I didn’t know it would be her…”

They don’t get it and I’m too tired and elated to explain it in more detail. There will be time for that later. I don’t want to let you go, but I pass you to Aaron anyway. You need to know that he is your father too. We all need to feel this connection equally.

“Hold your daughter,” I tell him as I gingerly deposit you in his arms. He smiles at you in a way he’s never smiled for anyone else. Then he smells the top of your head and cries like I did. Emily mumbles that the room is getting way too weepy.

After that we just take turns holding you, back and forth for hours until a nurse comments that we’ll ‘spoil’ you. She says that babies need to learn to be alone, that it teaches them to be self-sufficient. I say that I’ve never heard anything more ridiculous. How could a child ever be loved too much? Why would a race that craves connection foster loneliness in its young? From that moment I vow to tell you that you are smart, important, and kind at every opportunity. I pledge to give you everything I have, to love you unconditionally. I promise to teach you that while you may find yourself _alone_ from time to time, you should never feel _lonely._ I will always be with you. That nurse will not limit you, my daughter.

My Nomi.

You probably have questions about that: your name. Your mother and father know the significance but in case they’ve decided to be cryptic about it - your name is my name. My first one, the one I was born with, or as close as I could come to it using your language. It was Aaron’s idea and before I could get a word in edgewise, Emily proclaimed it as the only possibility. So, there you have it, Nomi Prentiss. Not only will you have part of me as a human, but you possess part of me as I truly am as well. Maybe you will get my nose, my smile, my hair, but you will have this too. Take care of it. It is a name I’ve taken eons to build, to stand for something, and I give it to you so you can change it and make it into something more.

We take you home and begin the most satisfying portion of my life here. Every day there is something new to discover about you, and because absolutely everything about the world is strange for you, watching you absorb it is like rediscovering it myself. I sleep very little in your first year, but it has nothing to do with midnight feedings, colic or teething. I am excited. All the time, each day. I cannot contain it. I want to show you everything, my love.

I remember my reaction when Maeve suggested that we have children. I couldn’t have been less interested. I understood the mechanics of conception and gestation. I had witnessed birth and seen various examples of childrearing. I thought this was all there was to it, and though I was wrong about that, I was correct when I speculated that the time drain is enormous. What I failed to understand then and fully grasp now is that there is more to raising young than hardwired survival instincts. There are intangibles, like love and wonder, that are powerful motivators and almost impossible to objectively qualify. One has to experience them to understand. Not everyone has these resources either. During my years at the FBI I saw plenty of examples of children who were mangled and destroyed by a lack of love. I think part of my hesitancy to be a parent was the fear that I _couldn’t_ love you the way human parents can. But all of the hushed midnights when I soothe you back to sleep, or feed you, or just need to hold you, I realize that this instinct isn’t limited to humanity. I’ve never had young of my own, of my own species, so I have nothing to compare this to, but I like to think that perhaps this feeling doesn’t have boundaries; no matter who or what we are, we all have the potential to be this way. 

On some of these nights with you, my thoughts drift to Maeve. I wonder if I could’ve had children with her after all. I wonder how different or similar the experience would be. I know that in _this_ universe it couldn’t happen (because it didn’t) but perhaps in another it did. Perhaps in another place I was better to her. Thinking this way allows me to release some of the guilt I carry about her. Maybe it’s not fair that I seek relief from it, but I do. I can’t change what happened and I do not want to impart that sadness to you, Nomi. So I let it go. I loved her in my own way and I like to think that the things she taught me, both good and bad, help me be better to you. There is a human saying - it takes a village to raise a child - and I believe that. Maeve is a part of your village, Nomi, though you never met her. That is why I wrote about her here. Remember her, my love, and understand that sadness has a purpose, even if we’d prefer to learn our lessons by easier means.

I have veered into melancholy, sweetheart. Forgive me. This time in which you grow and change so quickly, I do not have much time for melancholy. Because Emily and Aaron are still with the Bureau, I stay at home with you when Emily’s maternity leave expires. I take a sabbatical to study at the same time, and we do everything together. I tote you around every academic library in a three-state area. We take day trips to the countryside so I can _show_ you the sounds barnyard animals make. I take you to the Air and Space museum and tell you all about the things I’ve seen and know, and about all the things I still want to see and know…

In spite of this, your first word is ‘Fa’ when Aaron comes striding through the door one evening. He is absolutely elated, lost in your sticky, giggling embrace. I’m not saying I’m jealous. I prefer to think that you have an uncanny understanding of your parents’ minds and decided to lock in Aaron’s adoration for life in that moment. Smart plan, kiddo. Aaron is putty in your tiny hands ever afterwards. 

Emily has a harder time being a mother than I thought she would. It’s not that she can’t do it - it’s that she’s wonderful at it. Perhaps she never expects that. She finds herself constantly at war with the competing drives to excel at her career and to be there for you. It tears at her, Nomi, and there’s no easy solution. But she attacks it head on, like she does with any conflict, and somehow shoulders the burdens simultaneously and almost makes it look effortless. I do not envy her role in this, but I am amazed by her. She’s a marvel. Hug her often and for no reason, my love. Let her know that she’s doing a good job. You have no idea how hard she tries.

The years pass quickly, almost in a blur of inconceivable happiness and small accomplishments. I have never been more content. The hazy projections of you in my mind slowly start to solidify. Choices are made, others not, and your path takes shape even though you are still painfully young. Your importance becomes unassailable in my mind - every inch of me seems to vibrate with it - but I do not know the specifics. Even as I write this, I do not know what your future holds, only that it is undeniable. 

On your third birthday after we’ve put you to bed, I sit Emily and Aaron down to explain my visions. Naturally, they become worried. It’s hard to know that your child has an important role to play but not know what that role will entail. They want you to be safe, to have a life of your choosing, and while I cannot guarantee the ‘safe’ part, I assure them that there is no such thing as destiny. Whatever future you have is one that you will shape through your own choices. I just glimpse multiplicities of options and a majority of them spell out IMPORTANT. 

It is also during this conversation that I raise the topic of my eventual leaving. We haven’t discussed it since the day I revealed myself to them. But it cannot be ignored forever. It is 2019 and Aaron is fifty. Emily is forty-two. I have been on Earth for sixty years and I still look twenty-five. The neighbors are already curious about the three of us living in the same house with a small child. Every time Aaron and I take you to a birthday party or a playdate or to the park, people search your face for hints of whom you belong to. 

That in itself isn’t the problem though. 

Increasingly, the whispers aren’t about your mother’s unusual home life with two men. They are that _one_ of those men isn’t showing his age. Some try to ignore it. I have uncomfortable encounters with people in the grocery store or at the public library where they assume that I am a live-in nanny or a tutor. In one appalling incident during a street barbeque, a newcomer to the neighborhood asks Aaron if I am his son from a previous marriage. He goes pale and walks back to the house, and then he won’t let anyone but Emily touch him for days. It will only get worse. One day it’ll be assumed that I’m a grandson, or a caregiver, or a visiting palliative care nurse…

Emily suggests that we move, but that’s a temporary solution; we’ll just have to keep doing it.

“Well, leaving isn’t an option,” she snaps and then grabs me like the embrace will be her new state of being. “That’s just giving up.”

“Emily, think about this rationally…”

“No! Why should I? You’re my family. Why should I be okay with letting you go? You wouldn’t expect that of me if we were talking about Nomi…”

That statement comes close, but she hasn’t figured out the real reason why I have to leave. The aging thing is only a part of it. Watching her and Aaron wither and die will be excruciating for me. But the real horror will be you, sweetheart. Every day this boundless love I have for you knits me closer, tighter. There will be a tipping point - an event horizon that I can no longer escape - and I will be _unable_ to leave you behind. But if I let it get that far I will have to watch you die as well. I will travel with you through your life, creating the same upheaval that I am now with Emily and Aaron, until you too decline, enfeeble, and end. I cannot do it, Nomi. I cannot stand over the graves of the entities I love more than my own existence. I am not that strong.

Emily pleads and begs. Aaron holds me close in silence. And I give in. I am a sucker for these connections - I never claimed otherwise. But the time is coming. It is inevitable.


	11. Chapter 11

It is August 2021 and you’ve just had your fifth birthday. You are fully immersed in your ‘Why?’ phase. Everything is ‘Why, Daddy?’ and ‘What, Daddy?’ and ‘How does this work?’ I am loving every second of it. You are so bright, my love - you are blinding.

I have left Georgetown U and am now an independent researcher. It was not my choice: an enterprising undergraduate decides to impress me by researching my previous accomplishments and stumbles on the fact that I’ve had the same social security number for sixty years. The web has made it much harder for me to hide. The university board begins to ask questions and I respond by saying that I’ve been lured away by a job in the private sector, which effectively ends their need to investigate me. So once again, I am forced to move on.

Aaron retires from the Bureau in 2020, tired of the bureaucracy and the new dictates of the administration. Emily takes over his position as head of the BAU, being more political - and better at it - than he is. Instead Aaron puts his legal experience to work and joins a civil rights partnership that fights for the thousands of Muslims, immigrants, and other ‘undesirables’ that the U.S. government has placed in internment camps for ‘security reasons’ without due process. It is important and dangerous work, and Aaron is extremely good at it. Naturally, he makes many enemies. The world is so much more perilous now than when I first arrived, little one. I worry about leaving you in it.

But leave I must. 

The Department of Justice begins investigating corruption charges against your father in an attempt to end his civil rights challenges against them. The charges stem from his time as the BAU Unit Chief, and though they are baseless, the investigation digs into his past. Into his relationships with your mother and me. They begin taking an interest in _you_ , Nomi. We all understand the implicit threat of the camps; if you are ‘different’ there’s a good chance that you’ll end up in one eventually. Aaron lives with two lovers. There is a child in the home with questionable parentage. One of his lovers does everything he can to avoid notice. It is just a matter of time before one or all of these factors become a hue and cry for some narrow-minded, conservative government lawyer eager to make a name for himself.

We could run, but that’s not a real solution nor is it something any of us could happily swallow. We’ve all fought, in our own ways, against things like this. To give into it now when the world is most in need of people to _stand up_ is simply not an option. But still we are all parents and we are terrified for you, Nomi. We have to do something to keep you safe.

“It has to be me. I have to go,” I tell them.

“No,” Emily hisses at me but even I can tell that she’s thinking about it seriously this time.

“If I go, you two are just an unmarried couple with a child. There’s nothing scandalous in that. Maybe you once lived with another man, but that’s in the past. Nomi’s father isn’t named in her birth records. Everyone can just assume she’s Aaron’s biological daughter.”

It kills me to say this, to suggest that I disappear from your existence or that binary parentage is the only model that matters.

“They’ll still dig into your past, the trail you’ve left over decades.” Aaron’s face is a road map of pain. He will come to me later, privately, and beg me with his mouth and hands and heart to deny this reality. But for now his voice is quiet, calm. “They could still demand we prove Nomi’s ancestry…”

“Not without a court order and we still have some privacy laws in this country,” I growl. “Laws that I expect you to defend vigorously, Aaron.”

“That shouldn’t even be a question,” he growls back and I slouch. It hits me: _I’m going to leave them. I’m going to leave them **soon.**_

“It doesn’t matter. She’s human. They can question her genetics all they want but _she’s human_ and that will save her. There’s absolutely no reason to lock up an innocent, five year old girl.”

Emily makes a wet, choking sound and I wrap myself around her before I can even think about it.

“Please, love, please…” I sniffle into her hair. “We can do this. We can handle it… We have to.”

“I can’t,” she gulps and curls her fists into my shirt. “I love you. _I. Love. You._ I’m being forced to give you up for the same stupid, fucking reasons that we almost rejected you when you told us who you are. How am I supposed to be okay with that? How do I accept that everything about my existence in this world is forcing you out of it?”

“Emily,” Aaron huddles into her side and wraps his arms around both of us. “We knew this was coming… someday…”

“And how can you be so calm about it, Aaron?” she seethes and tries to shove him away. “You’re supposed to love him too.”

“I do. He’s the love of my damned life,” he rumbles fiercely while glaring at her. “It’s like… tearing a part of myself away… giving up my lungs. I don’t know how I’ll breathe once this is over.”

Oh, my love, I cannot breathe now watching them snap and score at one another because of me. Because my life isn’t compatible with theirs…

“But there’s Nomi,” Aaron continues, pleading his case. Ever the lawyer. “Em, as much as losing him is going to break me, losing _her_ would destroy me. It would destroy you too. They cannot take away what we’ve built here - we have to fight for it. We have to do this for her.”

“Yes, for Nomi,” I gulp.

“But Nomi needs you!” Emily curls up on her toes and brushes her lips desperately against mine. She’s trying to manipulate me and I want nothing more than to fall under that spell and stay forever. I don’t want to leave. She doesn’t understand - this really isn’t a choice. The addict in me roars to life and tells me to give in, to lie under their warmth and doze my life away… “She’s important - how many times have you told us that? How is she supposed to do whatever it is she’s going to do _without you?_ ”

“Emily” I kiss her quickly, just once to take the edge off my terrible desire to fall. “Nomi’s future has never been contingent on my presence. She needed my genetic contribution, but that’s all. She’ll make her own choices, carve her own path…”

“That’s not all! She adores you and you adore her!”

“And that’s why I have to leave!” I get too loud, hold her too tightly as we shake together. “Would you make me watch her age? Would you leave me here alone to bury her? Bury her children? Her grandchildren? How many of you must I love and then lose? How many graves would you have me stand over, Emily?”

“Okay, stop… Stop!” She pulls herself from my arms and backs against Aaron, who looks as if he’s picturing me standing guard over the bodies of my descendants.

“I’m strong enough to leave her now, Em,” I murmur. “But if I wait much longer I may not be. If I stay, I will be a threat to her for her entire life, and I’ll never escape this place. I’ll never get free of the endless cycle of loneliness. Remember when you asked me if I ever got tired of waiting to be alone again? Emily… sweetheart… I am tired of waiting.”

“Oh, fuck you, Starman,” she sobs and curls into Aaron’s chest to hide. “Using me against myself…”

I step close and then pull them both to me. They release each other and cling to me instead. The silence in the room is broken by muffled sniffing and the soft cinch of fingers digging into fabric like they’ll never let go.

“You have seeped into my cells,” I whisper when I can manage it clearly. “The change is irreversible. I’ll never lose you. My family…”

“Stupid alien…” Emily wheezes between sniffles but her grip tightens. We all stand there, locked together until our joints ache, trying to ignore that time is still moving forward.


	12. Chapter 12

So now I am sitting in my study writing this for you, my love. I needed to put some things in order so that you will understand. 

I thought it best, given the current suspicious political climate, to attempt to erase my past from general view. This requires skills none of us possess, so Aaron goes to Garcia. She, in turn, removes, dilutes, or obfuscates my sixty-year trail with frightening speed. She doesn’t bat an eyelash at my appearance or the request. I have to ask her why. She tells me that she always knew I was different, but the specifics were never important to her. Her knowledge of my character and our years of friendship were all the credentials she required to do something so dangerous on my behalf. I am once again humbled by this unexpected generosity. Humanity might be harmful and unwise, but individuals are often kind and astonishing and wonderful. I shall miss these little surprises. 

Since I am a man whose presence has been noted by many, my disappearance must also be noted, and adequately explained. Aaron and Emily decide to file a missing persons report once I’m gone. Garcia manufactures what she calls a ‘Dear John’ letter that will be conveniently found in my study by the authorities. It will suggest a midlife crisis and a need for escape from my relationships. Aaron will plant personal effects in a rugged area of Virginia to be found at a later date that will suggest I met with an unexpected end. Of course, a body will never be recovered. Emily and Aaron will be grief-stricken - they won’t have to pretend about that - and in time the whole scenario will be viewed merely as a tragic end to an unusual arrangement and nothing more. I know that your mother and father will tell you the truth but I want you to hear it from me as well: I would never leave them, or you, unless it was to ensure your safety. I never got bored with any of you. I would have never wandered in search of something more. Everything I want exists in this house. 

Time is ticking down, my love. I must say my goodbyes. You are in the backyard - I can see you from the window. You are covered in mud despite your mother’s decree that you stay clean. I think you are investigating bugs. Good for you - keep doing that. Investigating and getting dirty, I mean, not necessarily the bugs thing. I wish that I could be here to answer all of your questions, no matter how many you have. But Mom and Fa will be there for you, so ask them instead. I’m sure they won’t mind. Take care of them, my love. Cut them a break now and again - things haven’t been easy, you know. They are the best kind of people, but everyone makes mistakes and no doubt they’ll make a few with you along the way.

I have left you this story, all of my memories in the lock box, and my collection of books, records, and comics. Enjoy the Led Zeppelin, Nirvana, Philip K. Dick and _Watchmen_ \- they are my favorites. You may keep them or destroy them as you see fit. 

Now I wish to say a few things about what I _hope_ for you, daughter. 

I have told you that I ‘see’ things about you and that they seem important in some way. But this is not prescriptive - you should not feel limited by it. I _do not know_ what will happen to you. I fear and hope, but I actually know very little. I want you to promise me that you will only do your best in whatever you try. It doesn’t matter to me if your accomplishments - your ‘importance’ - are big or small, meaningful or only known by a few. It only matters that you try, you never give up, and that you remain curious about what _might_ be. Part of why I have written my life down is to show you that mistakes, sadness, even violence all have a role to play in shaping us. For a long time I saw these things as negative and to be avoided, but now I think they just _are_. It is how we deal with them that dictates the quality of a person.

This world is deeply troubled, more so than any other I’ve visited. We seem constantly on the verge of self-destruction; every generation adds another brutal layer to that equation. Something must happen here, Nomi, if this place is to go on much longer. I don’t know what that ‘something’ is (and believe me when I say that makes my departure so much harder to bear knowing that I am leaving you here to figure it out). But I firmly believe that whatever change comes will be manifested _individually_. Humanity as a whole is unable to enact global change without oppression. The change cannot come from without - it will have to start within, in the minds of good people of which I’ve already met so many. An individual can change another’s mind - our family is living proof of that. If enough individuals change, the ripple effect will become geometric in scale and _humanity_ will change. 

Love is part of the answer, Nomi. This unbelievable, unrestrained connection is both the source of humanity’s conflict as well as its possible salvation. Nothing moves us like love, or the distortion of it. I leave you in a home built by love and I hope it gives you what you need to go out into the wider world and do whatever it is that you will do. Earth will always be home to me now, as contentious and dangerous as it is: I love this place and the people in it. If I can feel this way - an alien and a stranger with so many lines that separate me from all of you - isn’t it possible for everyone else as well? I choose to think so. I hope this can be a legacy of sorts.

Stand for something, daughter, and be generous with your love. That is what I want for you. If you do this, whatever you accomplish will make me unspeakably proud. My faith in you is boundless.

I was wondering whether I should include this or not, but have decided that if I commit it to paper, I’ll take it more seriously. 

Aaron has extracted a promise from me. He has made me swear that I’ll return some day. 

My leaving is something that he understands on an intellectual level, but cannot endure, as I predicted so many years before. Though he adores you and Emily, I can see his resolve fracturing and I can’t leave him to quietly disintegrate. I love him too much to do that. Perhaps he understands that my promise is a shell game he is playing with his own grief - he’s smart enough to know that he may need to deceive himself in order to survive. But regardless, I have given him my word on the matter. It seems to have helped. When I said the words, his expression lifted, his shoulders straightened, and he seemed newly resolved to fight. Somehow it has given him his strength back and relieved the guilt that I know he feels about how his job has set this eventuality in motion. I don’t know when this will happen, Nomi, so I don’t want to get your hopes up. Time works differently out there, as I’ve explained, and I might get confused, lose track of things _here._ It’s very confusing to navigate. But I have promised Aaron and now I have promised you too. If one day you should see a strange person paying more attention to you than most, please be cautious but also be smart. Ask questions - I understand that I will have to prove who I am. I’ll look different, but know that I am exactly the same on the inside. It’s only a shell, Nomi.

 

What follows now is educated speculation on my part. I hope you don’t mind if I indulge in it for the sake of rounding out this story with a suitable ending.

Tomorrow I will act as if I am going to attend a lecture in D.C. I will kiss you goodbye in the morning before I leave the house and promise to be back for dinner. Forgive me for lying to you this way, Nomi, but I cannot watch you cry. I cannot bear to see you as you watch me leave this world. I am weak because I am doing this to spare myself more than you. 

Aaron and Emily will drop you off at J.J.’s to spend the day, and then they will meet me in a field in rural Virginia. While they agree to spare you the sight of my leaving, they refuse to turn their backs and walk away. And I made them a promise.

In this field I will shed my human form. Once I am free of it, it is gone forever. Should I ever return to Earth, I will have to choose a new one, so I will never look as I do now again. I will reveal my true likeness to Aaron and Emily for the first and only time. It will probably be a confusing, startling moment for them. I hope they find me pleasing anyway. 

To be blunt, I’m basically vapor. I don’t have facial features or limbs, and I’m translucent, though I can make myself darker and little more solid when I put my mind to it. I will probably do this for them. I hope that they are happy I kept my promise to show them who I am. We will not be able to communicate. I will understand them, but I have no physical vocalization abilities and their minds will not accept my telepathy. I will wait for their goodbyes. Maybe Emily will say something glib to cover up how she’s barely keeping it together. Maybe she’ll call me _‘Starman’_ or _‘stupid alien’_ again. I hope so. Aaron will probably reiterate what he’s already told me: he says that he’ll love me until his last breath, and I believe he will. He’ll remind me of my promise - of that I have no doubt. 

I know with absolute certainty that I will never stop loving either of them. I won’t be able to tell them this (though I hope it is amply understood ahead of time), but I will approach them. If they let me, I will reach for them making myself as solid as I can as I brush their faces. I hope that this will be enough without words.

I don’t think I will be able to handle more than this. It is already too much just speculating about it and then writing it out. I will leave them quickly, heading for the clouds, the atmosphere, and then the cold darkness of space beyond it. I will flee and feel and grieve for who knows how long. I will make my report on my time here, and I will await my next assignment. 

 

Nomi Prentiss, you are the reason I exist. Traveling part of the way with you through your life has been my joy and honor. My love for you is incalculable, but that feels like a bit of a cop out so let me try an analogy. Imagine all of the atoms in all of the elements of every single thing in the universe. Now imagine all of the spaces _between_ those atoms, and the places in space where there is nothing at all. Fill all of those spaces, those gaps, those atoms with a sensation of undeniable connection. _That_ is my love, daughter, or a pale allusion to it at least. If you ever feel alone or lost in your life, look up. I am there. We are a part of each other, and that means that we will never be alone.

You are smart. You are kind. You are important. And I am so damned proud of you.

With you always, your Daddy,

Spencer Reid


	13. Epilogue

Dear Daddy,

I know you like letters so I ~~think~~ thought I can writ to you. There are lots of blank pages in this book, so I can writ lots + lots of them. Mommy does not want me to. She says its ‘point-less’. But Fa says I should. He says its a good idea + smart. He says you are coming back sum day. I hope its soon.

I miss you, Daddy. Mommy + Fa miss you to. They think I dont remember you but I do. I remember the frogs we got from the cuntry to put in the bac yard. I remember I lost 1 in the house + Mommy screams when she finds it in her shoo. Mommy was funny. You laffed. 

Mommy + Fa are having a nu baby. He will be here soon. Im worryd. What if he does not like me? What if Mommy + Fa love him mor? They say they wont. They say they need me to be a brave big sister. I wish you were here, Daddy. That would be better.

I try to read this book sum times but you use a lot of werds. + there is kissing in it. You said its not gross but I think it is. Mommy says to skip those parts but I dont. She misses the kissing I think becus sum times I here her crying when she thinks Im a-sleep. She says stuff like He shuld be here. And Fa says stuff that makes no sense like He is + Hes coming back. I think the He is you, Daddy. Mommy doesnt believe in what Fa says but Fa doesnt fib. Is he rite? When are you coming home? I learnt every thing about birds. I need to tell you about them.

Im being good, Daddy. I promise + you will be proud when you come back. I read books + remember every thing. Mommy says thats speshul + you were like that to. I remember what you told me about the flowers in the yard. I water + feed them just like people + they are still alive! Sum times I miss you but I look up like you said to + then I feel better.

I will writ again tomorow in case you get lonely but rite now my fingers ~~hurts~~ hurt.

I love you like the univers, Daddy.

\- Nomi Prentiss, aged 7 ¾ years

p.s. thank you for the comics they are awesum!


End file.
